VANCOUVER — Unless you’re also from Manitoba or were a fan of Kamloops junior hockey in the early ‘80s or the Hartford Whalers in the mid-to-late-80s, probably the only thing you know about Dean Evason if you’re a Wild fan is he’s the guy Paul Fenton brought to Minnesota two summers ago after Evason served as Fenton’s AHL coach in Milwaukee for six years.
Advertisement
Other than the fact that he also bears an uncanny resemblance to Creed from the television show, “The Office,” who exactly is the Wild’s sixth coach in franchise history who took over for Bruce Boudreau last Friday on an interim basis for at least the rest of the season?
— “I’ll tell you what, he’s a friggin’ bloody hero in Kamloops,” said Ken Hitchcock, the longtime coach who has won the third-most games (849) in NHL history and got his major junior coaching start in Kamloops the year after Evason left as a player.
— “He’s a big golf nut,” said Hall of Famer Mike Modano, who played with Evason on the Dallas Stars — the fourth of Evason’s five-team NHLcareer that spanned 13 seasons and 803 games.
“Like obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with golf,” added Daryl Reaugh, Evason’s former Kamloops and Hartford teammate and a longtime Stars announcer.
Evason is a 2-to-3 handicap whose favorite courses include Winged Foot, Pebble Beach and Olympic Club outside the Twin Cities and Troy Burne, Prestwick and The Royal Club in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
“When we were in Hartford together, his closet was about 60/40 VHS tapes of golf on television because there was no Golf Channel and no internet or anything,” Reaugh said. “I mean, it was stacks and stacks and stacks of tapes, and he would go back and watch and re-watch it and basically coached himself to become a better player. And, he’d get so pissed if something got accidentally taped over.”
— “One of the ultimate team players,” Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett said of his former Hartford teammate. “Great checker. Good faceoff guy. Great penalty killer. Just a great teammate, somebody you could always, always, always rely upon.”
— “Super intense. Like, super, super intense,” said Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk, who played three games for Evason, then Kamloops’ coach, as a 15-year-old in 2001-02.
Advertisement
— “And tough as nails,” said Ray Ferraro, the TSN analyst who was Evason’s teammate on the Binghamton and Hartford Whalers. “Did he ever tell you how he fought Dale Hunter four or five times in one season?”
Actually, as Evason, now 55, said, it was “three times … in one period.”
It was New Year’s Eve 1985, Hartford faced the Quebec Nordiques, and Evason’s first three NHL fights came against the built-like-a-fire-hydrant Hunter at the 6:27, 11:51 and 17:37 marks of the second period. That means they squared off 24 seconds after coming out of the penalty box the first time and once more 46 seconds after they emerged from their respective boxes the second time before both, by rule, were booted from the game.
“I literally couldn’t move for a week,” Evason said. “My neck was so sore. He’s such a big, strong man. We were trying to survive. You’re trying to find something that sets you apart. One of them was to get in the odd scuffle with a guy. Him and I played a similar game. I’m not even close to his stature, but it was, I don’t want to say it was fun fighting three times in a period, but it was something that we both felt that we had to do to play and to stick around.”
It’s safe to say the 80’s were a bit different than it is today.
Twenty-six years later, what are the chances, but Evason, who was first hired as Glen Hanlon’s assistant in Washington, became Hunter’s assistant when he took over the Capitals bench for Boudreau in 2011?
By that time, the rivalry between Evason and Hunter had evaporated. Evason said it wasn’t awkward because as junior coaches, they actually sat down at a bar during the Memorial Cup one year, “had a beverage and chatted about it.”
After an 803-game NHL career and 20-plus years in coaching — most of them spent a step or two away from a top NHL job — Evason is finally getting his chance with the Wild. (Bruce Kluckhohn / NHLI via Getty Images)
Evason was also a true character, albeit a bit naïve as a youngster.
Ferraro was a member of the Whalers, Evason the Capitals, and the franchises shared an AHL affiliate in Binghamton, N.Y., in 1984-85.
Advertisement
Ferraro and Evason lived together coincidentally before Evason would be traded to Hartford.
“I mean, we’re kids. We don’t know anything, right?” Ferraro said. “We’ve been living with billet families our whole lives once we left home. So, we rent an apartment furnished in Binghamton for 460 bucks a month. We bought a car, an AMC Matador for 600 bucks.
“So, you can imagine what a piece of crap this thing was.”
Ferraro and Evason called the car, “The Bull.”
The “piece of crap” was turned into an even bigger “piece of crap” because Binghamton teammates Mike Hoffman and Dan Bourbonnais owned a big Cadillac and the four guys would get their kicks by always slamming their cars into each other.
“At the end of the year, I was called up to Hartford and Deano had to look after the apartment and the car,” Ferraro said. “But then the season ended, and he didn’t know what to do with the car. The cabbie pulled up to the apartment to take him to the airport, and Dean tried to give him the car. The cabbie is like, ‘No way. I don’t want it. Look at that piece of crap.’ Deano was giving the guy a free car and the guy didn’t want it!
“So, Dean just left the car, I believe, with the windows open hoping somebody would take it.”
A few months later, Evason was back home in Brandon, Manitoba, when he gets a call from the Binghamton Police.
“The cop goes, ‘Are you going to move your car?’” Ferraro said, laughing. “The car was such a piece of crap, nobody took it.”
“What’s funny,” Evason said, “I put all our pots and pans in there, too, and just left it outside our apartment. I didn’t know what to do with the car, so I took the license plates off. Me being naïve, I just threw the license plates away and I thought, ‘OK, if I’m back in Binghamton next season and the car’s still there, I’ll go get it and re-license it and that’ll be my car.’”
Advertisement
“Well,” Evason said, “the cop screams, ‘No, you can’t leave your fucking car.’ I mean, I’m 19 years old. We had no idea about what we’re doing and life. And the cop says, ‘You gotta get it off the street.’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m in Manitoba.’ The cop goes, ‘Well, what the hell do you want me to do with it?’ I said, ‘Do you want it?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I do have a 16-year-old son.’ I said, ‘It’s yours,’ and I mailed him the keys.’”
Evason was some kind of player in junior.
His last two years in Kamloops, he scored 71 goals and 164 points in 70 games in 1982-83 and 49 goals and 137 points in 57 games in 1983-84 for the team then known as the Junior Oilers. The league leader that year was Ferraro, who scored … 108 goals and 192 points for the Brandon Wheat Kings.
But Evason became a local hero in Kamloops when in Game 6 of the WHL championship against Regina, he scored to force overtime.
“We were 12 seconds from being done,” said Reaugh, the goalie on that team. “It was a crazy series. We played in this tiny little venue, Kamloops Memorial Arena. I mean, it was like The Aud (Buffalo Memorial Auditorium) or Boston Garden small, maybe smaller. It was tiny and intimidating. So, we had a severe home advantage and we played for Bill LaForge then, so it was just brawls and intimidation.
“But along with that it was skill and talent. We had tons of it. So we won our home games. And then we went out and we got smoked in Regina, and then came back and we were in Game 6, and we were 12 seconds from being done, and Deano scored that colossal goal. We won it in overtime, then won Game 7 and won the WHL to go to the Memorial Cup.
“But, I mean, it is so fitting that he was the guy that scored that goal because he was our unquestioned leader on a really good team with a ton of really good players. But Deano was our guy. And I don’t even know if he was our most talented player at the time. But he led us. He was our captain. We followed him everywhere. He cared about his teammates, and he’d kill to win.”
“We gotta get on the same page as soon as possible and prove that we can be a playoff team.” -Captain Mikko Koivu
Hear more from interim Head Coach Dean Evason and Dubnyk, Suter Koivu, Stalock after today’s news. pic.twitter.com/rxxewEaWkI
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) February 14, 2020
Dubnyk was a teenage callup to the now-called Kamloops Blazers when Evason was coaching there and even he immediately recognized what type of legend his coach was in the city because of that goal and his production throughout his junior career.
Advertisement
“It was cool to have a guy coaching there that had done what he had,” Dubnyk said. “I wasn’t up to date on his entire career, but I knew at the time that he was a big deal there.”
Those Evason-led Junior Oilers teams played for a real disciplinarian in LaForge.
“And Deano was the only guy that had the balls to stand up to him,” Reaugh said. “We’d be out having a team party and curfew would be like 11 o’clock and it would be 10 (minutes) to 11, and somebody had to phone Coach and ask, ‘Hey, can we go to 11:30?’
“And I mean that’s an intimidating call with Bill LaForge. And it was always Deano, and he’d always come back and say, ‘OK, I got us until 11:30.’ And sure enough, 25 after 11, ‘Deano, can you go call and see if we can get ‘til midnight?’ He’d always make that call again, and sometimes it was like, ‘Got us another half-hour,’ or, ‘He ain’t shitting around. We’ve got to go.’ And away we’d go because Deano told us to go. Deano was our conduit between a very, very demanding, intimidating man and the rest of the group. And I think he’s stayed that way all the way through his life. He’s honest, emotional, tough, cares about the team and his teammates first.
Despite being a junior star, when Evason turned pro and especially after he got to Hartford, he recognized right away that he better evolve the type of style he played if he had any prayer of forging an NHL career.
“This is one of the reasons I think he’s been a successful coach and a good coach wherever he’s been,” Ferraro said. “Remember, this is a guy, who had (164) points in junior and what we looked at was we had Ron Francis, who was clearly the best player by a mile. And then there was me and Dean. I think the Whalers probably looked at it and thought I was going to score more and Dean was going to be a way better checker.
“And so we fell into the two and three (center) roles. He changed his game from an offensive game into a defense-minded game first. I think that helps him as a coach because he can relate to the offensive guy. He understands it because that’s who he was. But he relates to the checking guy because that’s also who he was.
Advertisement
“This was one hard-nosed guy, too. He did not play on the end of his stick. He was in the middle of it all the time. He became a character player wherever he went. He’s seen the game from a whole bunch of different sides of it. And I think that makes him really relatable.”
Reaugh, Tippett and Modano all said separately that Evason’s transition was not unlike the one Hall of Famer Guy Carbonneau made when he got to the NHL. Carbonneau was a junior scoring sensation in the Quebec League, then became one of the NHL’s best defensive forwards of his generation.
“Maybe not to the same level as Guy, but Deano reinvented himself,” Reaugh said. “For Deano to stick in the NHL, he had to turn himself from a really good two-way forward in junior who slanted toward offense to slanting toward defense as a pro.
“He has always been the type of guy that if you throw a challenge in front of him, he’s going to meet it. He’s smart. He knew that and became that and worked at it in order to stay there for a long, long time.”
Said Evason, “You have to find something that sets you apart in order to stay. I knew I could not score however many goals I scored in junior. There’s no way. So I had to find a way to play in the NHL, and that was to be a checker, to play a gritty game, to obviously be a good teammate.”
Of Evason’s five NHL stops, Hartford was his longest stay. He played 434 games across seven seasons with the Whalers, scoring 87 goals. (Graig Abel / Getty Images)
Tippett pointed out how amazing it is that so many people from those Hartford teams are either coaching or are still in the game.
“We were just in Florida and I was talking to (Joel) Quenneville about it,” Tippett said of his Oilers. “But it’s not just me and Q, it’s now Deano and Kevin Dineen and GMs like Ron Francis and a ton of assistant coaches, and guys like Ray Ferraro in the business, and an agent in Mike Liut.
“We had a good group of guys. Everybody liked the game. It was a real character group led by Emile Francis, our GM. I don’t know, it was a real comradery. I’ll get a real kick out of coaching (Friday night in Edmonton) against Deano.”
Advertisement
Modano said, “I don’t know what Kool-Aid they were drinking in Hartford back then, but there’s about eight head coaches that came out of that team.”
Modano, the Wild’s executive advisor to owner Craig Leipold and president Matt Majka and somebody who also advises general manager Bill Guerin, had a lot of fun with Evason toward the tail end of Evason’s career in the mid-90s in Dallas.
“But boy, when he was at the rink, it’s all business,” Modano said. “He was serious. He wanted to play well. He wanted to be committed. He was a hard-working guy, so he was really diligent in that aspect of it. Responsible in his own zone, good faceoff guy, good at shot-blocking, killing penalties. But he was creative and could make plays. He just understands all aspects of the game, and I think that’s what he’ll bring to our guys as a coach.
“I’ll tell you what. He’ll be direct. He’s not going to sugarcoat things. He’s old school, so he’s probably not going to be afraid to call out anybody and get in their face. This day and age, athletes are, they’re a little sensitive. They don’t like to be singled out anymore. But still, you don’t perform, you’re not playing well, you’re not going to play. I think that’s the way he views it, which is come ready to play. You commit to yourself and you get in there and you’re going to get rewarded with some minutes.”
That’s precisely the way Ferraro feels.
“If somebody goes in and asks him a question, they will know the answer,” Ferraro said. “They might not like it, but they will know the answer.”
Laughed Reaugh, “I just hope he doesn’t swear too much.”
Well, he probably will.
“You’ve got to be who you are,” Evason said. “I don’t like talking about me … but my message right away was two words: communication and accountability. That’s what we’re asking of our group right away. As an ex-player and then as a coach, players want that, they want to be communicated to, even if it’s negative. They want straight up, and they want to be accountable.”
Dubnyk finds it fascinating how things come full circle sometimes and now he finds himself playing for Evason 18 years later.
Advertisement
“That was his first gig,” Dubnyk said. “I knew him a little bit from training camp before that because I was there as a 14-year-old, and then getting called up, he was super intense. He still has that in him. You can just see how passionate he was then, you see the same thing now. A little more mellowed out. I’m sure it’s easier to be a little more mellow dealing with us than a bunch of teenagers in junior high.
“But it was definitely a different step going from playing Bantam with volunteer coaches to jumping in with Deano.”
Dubnyk was an emergency callup. As a 15-year-old, he was not allowed to play more than five games. Kamloops’ goalie had a high ankle sprain, so Dubnyk spent the final two or three months in Kamloops mostly practicing.
“I played two games right away. I started in one,” Dubnyk said. “I flew from Calgary to Vancouver, was late for the game, started that game, got torched. And then the next night, I’m feeling like the puck looks about the size of a pea. There’s a line brawl halfway through the second period. It was 0-0 at the time. I’ll never forget this. I’m sitting on the bench, and every guy on the ice is fighting, including the goalies. I’m 15 years old watching this go down. This is a movie to me. It was that surreal.
“Everybody’s getting kicked out. The fact that the goalies are getting kicked out of the game didn’t even register in my brain. Like, there was not one part of me that realized that this meant I was going to play. I’m just sitting there watching them clean up the ice, everybody’s picking up gloves and shit, and I’m like, ‘Wow, that was crazy.’
“I’ll never forget, Deano comes down the bench and screams on top of his lungs, ‘Duby, what the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out on the ice!’
“And then all the color goes from my face. The puck looked like a BB. Things were moving quick out there. But we won like 5-2 or 5-1, and that was my first junior win.”
Advertisement
Dubnyk would only play one more game because Evason wanted to save his final two eligible games in case of an absolute emergency.
“So, after every practice, I played 3-on-3 with Deano after practice,” Dubnyk said. “In junior, you got your young guys and guys that don’t play much. Every day after practice, it was three coaches against three scratches and me. And, it was a really intense game of 3-on-3. I mean, Dean was just coming off of playing, so he put a few past me, to say the least, as a 15-year-old.”
Obviously, any time you become an interim coach, it’s an awkward situation.
Evason worked for Boudreau for parts of five seasons in Washington and Minnesota. In Minnesota, it got uncomfortable at times because Evason replaced Boudreau’s best friend, John Anderson and the common public sentiment was Evason was hired so Fenton could eventually replace Boudreau with the coach he trusted and respected.
Boudreau and Evason did have a heart to heart before this season. Boudreau asked him point-blank if he knew that Fenton tried to replace Boudreau a couple times last season with Evason.
Evason denied knowing and remained in his role.
“The hardest part for (Evason) is he’s been with Bruce a long time,” Ferraro said. “I don’t think there’s anybody that thinks poorly of Bruce. Like how could you? So that would be the toughest transition for Deano to make when all of a sudden your longtime friend and coaching associate is now gone, and you’re there to improve upon what he’s done.”
When Paul Fenton hired Evason before last season, speculation was he was being prepped to ultimately replace Bruce Boudreau. Now Evason is the last of the three still with the team. (Bruce Kluckhohn / NHLI via Getty Images)
As awkward as this is for Evason, this is a dream come true. Since 1998-99, Evason has been in the No. 1 or 2 coaching hole with six teams and his ultimate goal was becoming an NHL head coach. In Milwaukee, his teams were always successful, and the mark of a good AHL coach isn’t so much wins and losses but how many players you help develop and elevate to the NHL.
Advertisement
In Nashville, many Predators over the years have had Evason’s fingerprints on their careers, including the Wild’s Kevin Fiala.
“Honestly, it just so feels so good,” Evason said of being an NHL head coach. “When you’ve done something, and then you get back at it again, especially in practice, it’s so much fun. Running the drills, pace, watching the guys work, it’s exciting for me as a coach.”
This is an uncertain time for the Wild. The team visits the Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday and Friday nights for the father-son trip, then hosts the defending Stanley Cup champion St. Louis Blues on Sunday. The Wild, 1-2-1 in their past four and having dropped Evason’s debut to the San Jose Sharks by a 2-0 score, are seven points out of a playoff spot with the trade deadline approaching next Monday.
If the Wild keep fizzling, Evason could be coaching a very different-looking team next week.
“Can it be a playoff team?” Ferraro said. “Look, I’m a longtime friend to Dean and biased, but the deficiencies are so critical and so obvious (goaltending and center depth). I think it’s going to be difficult. I don’t know how many tweaks you can make to the system at this time of the year. Because you could change 10 things and you still got the same actors, right?
“Until the personnel changes or maybe some of the guys get back on the beam, it’ll be hard. I would think his first order of business is to get into some of the older guys, and because he’s a new voice, is to try and prop them up and build them up. Because they’re not going anywhere unless those veteran guys get untangled.
“But I think he will do a very good job. Like, Dean’s a very good coach.”
Reaugh agreed, saying, “Hey, look, you clamor your whole life to get a shot as a head guy, so I hope the guys respond to him. I hope he does well. I don’t know what you can get done in a month or two, but at the very least, you’re getting your opportunity and at least now will have a track record at this level of how your team played under your guidance.”
Advertisement
That’s the other elephant in the room here.
In a lot of ways, even though Evason has term left on his contract past this season, Boudreau’s firing could ultimately spell the end of Evason in Minnesota. While Guerin says Evason will be one of the men he interviews for the full-time job after the season, if Evason doesn’t get the job, it’s uncertain if the new coach would want the interim back in an assistant’s role.
“This will sound made up, but (Evason) won’t think of that,” Ferraro said. “He won’t let that get into his brain. He’ll plow straight ahead.”
(Top photo: Bruce Kluckhohn / NHLI via Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kG9ocWhiZXxzfJFpZmlqX2aGcLDEmqVmnaaWwLC6jLCgpZxdnru1sdGipGabn5awqXnPq6afoZyaeqO1zmaimqWcpLyxv4yhmKuslqS%2FpXnWoZilnaKofA%3D%3D