RALEIGH, N.C. — The Stanley Cup playoffs were where Patrick Roy elevated his status as a player into legendary.
As a first-time postseason coach 18 years ago, it was where he tossed some gasoline, lit some matches and won a trophy.
“I was a little warrior-y. And so was he,” Eric Veilleux, who coached against Roy’s Quebec Remparts with the Shawnigan Cataractes in the 2006 QMJHL playoffs, recalled during a February sit-down. “… We did not have a team to match what these guys had. Back then, physicality was a way for us to stay in games. Maybe try to — I don’t want to say intimidate them — but that made him not very happy sometimes.
“So we went at it a little bit.”
Veilleux wasn’t the only coach who found himself in a verbal sparring match with Roy that spring.
Ted Nolan — yes, the same Ted Nolan who coached the Islanders a year later — took offense during the Memorial Cup after Roy took a shot at his netminder, saying, “He played better than I ever thought he’d be playing, to be honest with you. But he’s due for a tougher game and yesterday I thought he gave up two soft goals. Hopefully, he’ll repeat and we’ll take advantage of it.”
Then there was Vancouver Giants coach Don Hay, who said Roy should worry about his own team after the greatest goaltender of all time offered his opinion during the Memorial Cup’s round-robin stage that, “Vancouver, with great goaltending, would be 2-0.”
Leaving a horde of annoyed opponents in his wake, Roy’s Remparts won the Memorial Cup.
Roy’s methods have changed considerably since then — Carolina netminder Frederik Andersen was spared any such heat when the Islanders’ head coach spoke Friday.
But the all-out intensity that got Roy four Stanley Cup rings and three Conn Smythe Trophies is the same characteristic that drove his success in getting the Islanders to the playoffs.
“You gotta go out there with a lot of confidence and trust what you’ve been doing,” Roy said before the Islanders jetted to Carolina ahead of Saturday’s Game 1 against the Hurricanes. “Because you can’t change everything because you’re going into the playoffs. You just let the emotion take over and let — I don’t have the English word — but let your drive take over.”
This is only the second NHL playoff series Roy has coached, with 10 years between now and the 2014 first round when the Wild beat his Avalanche.
But the midseason coaching change that saw the Islanders install Roy in place of Lane Lambert is the single biggest reason why they made it this far to begin with.
Roy overhauled the team’s systems on both ends of the ice.
And, just as importantly, brought a mindset and intensity level that they’d been lacking prior.
“One of the first things he said when he got here is, it’s playoff hockey for us the rest of the way out to have a chance to make it,” Kyle Palmieri told The Post. “I think it was an opportunity to take a deep breath and really just put into focus what was in front of us.”
For the most part, the players in the Islanders’ dressing room have been around each other for a pretty long time.
Roy was not just a fresh set of eyes, but one that commanded the sort of instant respect necessary to pull off a midseason overhaul of how a team full of players that had an established way of working was going to do things.
“I think more than anything, it just takes guts to do that,” Hudson Fasching told The Post. “You gotta be like, we’re just gonna do it. It’s like, whatever happens, happens. Obviously, you see there’s gonna be some negative consequences from that. We go through a skid where we’re trying to figure it out.
“The first couple games we maybe played well with intensity or whatever it is, but it takes a while to flip the whole [thing] — you’re gonna get some bad with the good there. In the long run, obviously, you see there’s a benefit.”
after scoring a goal against the New York Rangers. Noah K. Murray-NY Post
This season, more than others, required the Islanders to compromise and adjust on the fly.
That meant a couple stops and starts under Roy as everyone tried to figure out where and how this marriage would fit together.
The last three weeks of the season, during which the Islanders put together an out-of-nowhere charge into the postseason, represented everything finally clicking without the same subsequent step back that followed previous runs.
“The big change in my opinion is our mindset,” Roy said. “How we handle giving up a goal, having a bad shift. … They seem to handle those situations very well. I think that explains a lot of our success down the stretch.”
Now, all that’s left is for the Islanders to let their drive take over.
