Barry Trotz

Barry Trotz
Barry Trotzis the head coach of the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals and the former head coach of the NHL's Nashville Predators. He was previously the coach of the American Hockey League's Baltimore Skipjacks and Portland Pirates, with whom he won an AHL championship in 1994. That same year, he won the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award, which is awarded to the outstanding coach in the AHL as voted upon by the AHL Broadcasters and Writers. On February 20, 2013...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth15 July 1962
CityWinnipeg, Canada
I think people probably sell him a little short on that end of the ice. He's got good skills, and he likes to jump up in the play. I could certainly see him on a second power-play unit.
I thought Mike played really well, especially when we had some good chances. When they got the lead in the second period, he came up with a few big saves. Then early in the third, he had some big saves, especially on the 5-on-3 that we weren't able to capitalize on.
I didn't like the way we played our game. The second period killed us. A lot it was due to face-offs. It started there. Structurally, we didn't play intelligently and that bothered me. When you do that against a good team like Atlanta, they will tear you apart.
We spent a little too much time in our own zone. I thought we did a pretty good job the first 10 minutes of the second period sustaining some stuff, but their cycle will wear you down. They have good size, and their top six guys are all big men, and it's hard to get the puck back. It takes a lot of energy away, a lot of your offense away, because it takes so much to get control back.
We had a couple of big saves from Chris Mason in the third. We had bang-bang goals in the second period and Hartnell came up with the big goal at the end. It was a key goal for us. They sort of had us on our heels, they were coming hard, but we were able to get the big goal tonight when we needed it.
It's good for our team to be able to come into Detroit and play like that against an extremely good team. I can remember the first and second - and even the third and fourth - years of this franchise, we really had no belief that we could come in here and win.
A little bit of a turning point is that they scored 17 seconds after we got a 2-0 lead.
I learned a lot about our character. We didn't back off. We didn't get off to the start we wanted. In the first period ... we took some undisciplined penalties and we didn't skate. But in the second and third periods we did skate and we played the way we have been playing and it showed in the final result.
Early in the year we were getting a lot of grief from people, saying you're playing some teams that aren't quite as strong. But they were strong teams, we just sort of got their number early.
Better walking than lying down in a hospital bed any day.
I wanted a sense of desperation going into the third period. Our resilience was not acceptable. I was more disappointed in that than anything else.
Every game has been a one-goal game and a nail-biter, if you will, but we'll take it. They don't ask how, just how many.
We scored early and we were very fortunate when they countered and tied the game up. We responded right away.
Vancouver lost two defensemen for probably a week to 10 days in that tournament, which doesn't bode well for them.