To fully understand how Dan Bylsma has changed between his meteoric rise with the Pittsburgh Penguins and comeback chance with the Seattle Kraken, it’s helpful to know how he once viewed coaching in the NHL.
This was in the late spring of 2015, not quite a full year since the Penguins fired him even though he won the Stanley Cup and reset their coaching records in a dizzying five-plus seasons. Paid by the Penguins not to work the final year of his contract, Bylsma found talking about hockey on television unfulfilling. He still had the itch.
He also had leverage as a hot coaching commodity.
“I’m in a position where I don’t have to take just any job,” Bylsma said at the time. “I’ve been in that (more desperate) position most of my hockey life. I don’t ever want to be in that position again.”
Within a few weeks, Bylsma was hired by the Buffalo Sabres. He was fired after two seasons.
And despite a resume that included a Cup win, a Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year and a Winter Olympics appearance as coach of Team USA, Bylsma would not get another crack at calling shots from behind an NHL bench for seven years.
Bylsma landed his third NHL head-coaching job in May, becoming the Kraken’s second coach in franchise history.
The job comes with pressure to establish the Kraken as a perennial contender. Fair or not, Seattle, which began play in 2021, is compared to the previous expansion team, the Vegas Golden Knights, who were Stanley Cup favorites by their fourth season and won it in their sixth. The Kraken bet on Bylsma — whom the league seemed to have forgotten — to get Seattle to that point, even though the franchise has missed the postseason two of its first three years.
Bylsma knows something about quick turnarounds. He is still most famous for overseeing a late-season transformation in Pittsburgh — after the Penguins fired coach Michel Therrien and elevated Bylsma, who had been coaching the team’s AHL affiliate — that helped Sidney Crosby lift the Cup for the first time in 2009. His energy, catchphrases and attacking system surprised the NHL, turning him into one of its most prominent coaches.
That feels like a lifetime ago to Bylsma. The words he offered before taking over the Sabres now sound as though they were said by a different person.
“I do remember saying that, thinking that,” Bylsma said this summer on a cross-country drive a couple of weeks after the Kraken announced his hiring.
He paused and huffed a few times — not in a dismissive way but instead in a laugh. That’s Bylsma, who often finds the funny in moments of authentic reflection.
“I don’t know if I feel comfortable saying I’m not that guy anymore; there are parts of that guy I recognize in who I am today,” Bylsma said. “But if you’re asking me, ‘Am I the same guy I was then?’ — I’d like to think I’ve shown I’ve changed in a lot of ways. I’m not as … I’ll say it: stubborn. And there are probably other words people would use to describe me back then. But stubborn is the one I heard the most, and that’s fair.
“I was stubborn. There were certain things I thought — especially, but also specifically when it comes to coaching — and I was stubborn about those things.”
Another pause. Another few huffs.
“I’ll tell you this, however many years later,” Bylsma said. “This isn’t just any job for me. It’s my shot. It’s probably the only one I’m going to get in the National League. I worked for it. It wasn’t guaranteed. And if I was still the stubborn guy, I wouldn’t have it.”
Kraken assistant general manager Jason Botterill held the same role with the Penguins for much of Bylsma’s tenure in Pittsburgh. He was aware of Bylsma’s strengths and weaknesses. He sensed that the enthusiasm, messaging and relatability to players — Bylsma carved out his own modest NHL playing career — would make Bylsma a perfect fit to helm the Kraken’s startup AHL franchise, Coachella Valley. Any concerns Botterill might have had about the weaknesses — that stubbornness — had already been eased when Bylsma joined AHL’s Charlotte Checkers as an assistant coach for the 2021-22 season.
“Dan deserves a lot of credit,” Botterill said. “There aren’t many people with his resume who would go to the AHL like he did.”
The AHL has become a haven for former NHL coaches seeking to find their way back, even if the time between the so-called big jobs is long and arduous.
The Penguins’ Mike Sullivan is an example. After his first NHL head-coaching job with the Boston Bruins ended in 2006, he bounced around NHL assistant-coaching jobs before taking over the Penguins’ AHL affiliate, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, for the 2015-16 season. As Penguins associate GM, Botterill watched as Sullivan did that season what Bylsma had done in Pittsburgh several years prior — take an NHL promotion and turn it into Cup immortality.
Still, Sullivan had not gone to the AHL as an assistant coach, as Bylsma did with Charlotte.
“I don’t know if I’d say it was exactly by choice,” Bylsma said, referring to NHL head coaching offers not coming his way. “At the time we’re talking about, I had talked with my wife, and we agreed that if I wanted to be a head coach in the National League again, it was time to either go in that direction or accept it wasn’t going to happen.”
Bylsma had spent several seasons as an assistant with the Detroit Red Wings. There wasn’t a lot of winning, but the experience was rewarding in that he was able to observe the inner workings of an NHL organization he wasn’t co-leading with a GM. Part of the challenge presented by Bylsma’s fast rise with the Penguins in the late 2000s was that he hadn’t benefitted from lessons an NHL assistant coach can learn by having a singular focus and more opportunities to observe.
Did Bylsma’s role as head coach keep him from learning how to adapt?
“I wouldn’t say it that way,” Bylsma said. “But you do — I did — learn a lot when you’re working for a head coach, and there is a difference when it comes to the players. And if you’re asking if I had a lot of those things reinforced during my time with the Red Wings, my answer is yes.
“If I’m a different person and a coach today, it started there. And if you’re wondering if that experience made me want to become a coach in the National League again, I think it’s probably fair to say the answer is also yes.”
Bylsma has some tells when he’s being honest. One is that he asks and answers questions in conversation — as he did when talking about joining Coachella Valley.
“Was it a unique opportunity because we knew the (Palm Springs) area from my days as a player (in Los Angeles and Anaheim)? It was,” Bylsma said. “Was it comfortable because of that, and because I know (Botterill), and it was closer to my son when he was in college (at the University of Utah)? Those were also factors. Did I want to be head coach again? Obviously, yes.
“But what excited me about Coachella Valley, including all of that, is it gave me a chance to apply some of these changes as the head coach. So I never thought, ‘Oh, this is where I’ll go to be back to the National League.’ I wanted to go to Coachella Valley and see if the things I thought I learned actually worked.”
They did. Coachella Valley reached the Calder Cup Final in each of Bylsma’s two seasons. His last crack at the Calder Cup came when he was already hired to assume control of the Kraken.
The fastest coach to 200 NHL wins who couldn’t get a sniff of a third NHL job for so many years suddenly found himself as the head coach of an AHL and NHL team at the same time.
It’s a completely absurd and unconventional path, which is sort of how it seems to work for Bylsma.
Since he was hired for the Coachella Valley job, Bylsma repeatedly said how much he’s changed while also denying that he needed to do a lot of changing. As for which Bylsma the Kraken are getting, he tried to keep it short and sweet.
“That’s never been my strength,” he said, huffing in laughter again. “But if you’re asking if I think there is just one way to play hockey — no, I don’t think that anymore. If you look at how our teams at Coachella Valley played and compared to what our teams in Pittsburgh did, it’s not the same.”
Except for the results. There was a lot of winning in both places.
The Kraken are confident that winning is the one thing about Bylsma that hasn’t changed. If nothing else, they can take comfort in knowing he has already asked and answered that question of himself.
“I’m confident I know the answer,” Bylsma said. “But we’ll see. I can say that I know this is the right place to find out.”
(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
