Good morning. I chatted with Chicago Blackhawks assistant coach John Torchetti for awhile this morning for a feature I'm writing in the coming days. But I also talked to him on a few other subjects, especially the fact that last week he won his first Stanley Cup of his career.
He gave me some pretty good color of what happened after Patrick Kane scored the Cup-clinching goal that nobody knew went in except for Kane.
If you remember, as the players were celebrating behind the Chicago net, the three Blackhawks coaches stood side by side behind the bench as Torchetti was radioing upstairs to find out, "Is it in? Is it in?"
"But Kane had come by and said, 'It's [expletive] in. Get off the bench,'" Torchetti said, laughing. "I said, 'I don't know.' Joel [Quenneville] goes, 'I don't know either. Let's just wait.' Then they lifted up the net and it looked like a slow-motion film of the puck coming underneath the white thing and flopping. And I screamed, 'That's in.' Because all I kept thinking about before was Brett Hull's goal [in 1999].
"It was a lot of fun. It was a helluva ride, as they say."
As we moved on, Torchetti was all excited about "Mikey Yeo." The Wild has hired Yeo, the Pittsburgh Penguins assistant coach the past five seasons, as its Houston Aeros head coach in the American Hockey League.
"Great guy. I coached against him when he played in Houston with Tippy (Dave Tippett) when I was with San Antonio and Fort Wayne in the IHL. He was probably one of the better two-way players in the IHL. The compete was amazing. You noticed him every game. He caught your eye. And then we became friends through coaching when he was with Wilkes-Barre. I used to tell him when I first met him, 'Man, you were my type of player.'"
"He's a very good coach. After my first year, our power play was struggling and I wanted to do [Pittsburgh's] power play with the lefties --where they had Malkin, Crosby, Whitney, Gonchar. So I called him, and they were in the Eastern Conference, so he gave it to me and it was very effective and helped jump-start our power play here. That's a friend right there. Really good guy. I think the players are going to like him a lot too because he's not too far removed, but he's definitely a coachable coach. The way he played you knew he was probably going to be a coach because that's how he played the game -- like a coach. It's going to be a very good name for the fans down there to identify with because they liked him a lot when he played there."
