Quickly, as I celebrate my wife's birthday weekend ...
Rick Tocchet was calm, cool, collected in his first presser as Lightning head coach.
The Bolts head to Carolina for an afternoon tilt with the Hurricanes tomorrow and the new bench boss has it all focused on the game at hand.
"We've got two points to get from Carolina," Tocchet said.
"We don't have time to worry about anything else right now."
Tocchet says that immediately the tempo will be cranked up with this team, the pace will be elevated and the shifts will be shorter.
"There won't be any minute shifts on this team," he said.
It sounds a lot like Tocchet wanting his team to play a Rick Tocchet-like game. Not everyone's in that mold, of course, but semblances of his game can rub off on everyone.
"We're gonna go to the net more," he added.
"Perimeter hockey is not going to be a part of the Tampa Bay Lightning."
Sure as hell sounds Tocchet-esque to me ...
He also cited a more hard, bottom line stance than that of Barry Melrose for the first sixteen games of the season.
"It just has to be that way," Tocchet said of the style the team will play under his direction.
No room for anything else.
Hopefully, the message will stick. It wasn't getting through under Melrose, surely.
For Tocchet, the opportunity to man an NHL bench is a great one and he comes from a great coaching pedigree - from Scotty Bowman to Mike Keenan to Wayne Gretzky.
Interim title or not, the Bolts will give him a fair shake at making his mark as there is no coaching search ongoing at this time.
More later ...
Enjoy the weekend.
JJ
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