In a hard-cap NHL where top-six players inhale much of the salary oxygen, a franchise’s success depends heavily upon how it nurtures and ‘coaches up’ its younger players.
Enter Hamilton native, Derek King.
As head coach of the AHL’s Rockford IceHogs he’s entrusted with the Chicago Blackhawks’ youngest pro prospects as the Hawks continue to transition from a veteran-laced Stanley Cup team which traded away draft choices and prospects to remain competitive into a more sustainable talent-flowing-upward model.
“We have to develop our players here so they can step in and play for the Blackhawks,” King says from Rockford, 150 kilometres west of Chicago. “The Hawks put a lot of money and emphasis on developing players, make us a big part of the organization and give us every tool we need to do it.”
King’s hockey resume is long, thick and varied and includes gems like this one: he scored the Toronto Maple Leafs’ very last goal in Maple Leaf Gardens.
After a prolific junior career he was the New York Islanders’ first draft choice, 13th overall, in 1985. Through 830 NHL games, he had 261 goals and 612 points, including a three-year stretch in the early 1990s over which he produced 108 goals. In the second and third last years of his 14-season NHL career he totalled 45 goals for the Toronto Maple Leafs, before ending with another five playing years in the minors.
And by then he’d already been coaching for two years.
Playing in Munich for a season, he found he loved the responsibility of working with the younger players, advising them on how to become consummate pros. So, he accepted a job as playing coach the next two years with Grand Rapids, Detroit’s AHL affiliate. After he hung up his competitive skates, it was five years coaching kids in Arizona before Dallas Eakins offered him an assistant’s job on his talented AHL Toronto Marlies coaching staff. Six years and three divisional titles later, he moved to Rockford as an assistant.
Partway through the 2018-19, his 11th season as an AHL assistant, he was promoted to head coach.
“I like to think you pay your dues,” King says of finally getting his own team.
It’s an odd year in the AHL. There are no Calder Cup playoffs, and most NHL teams are focusing their development teams exclusively on player improvement, ignoring wins and losses. The IceHogs have 17 AHL rookies on the roster — sophomore MacKenzie Entwistle, the popular former Hamilton Bulldog, is a relative veteran — and went 1-8 over the first month but they’re a game over .500 since.
“These kids were still trying to figure out how to get groceries delivered,” King laughs of the bad start. “But ever since then, there’s been a playoff-type mentality, even though there’s no playoffs. I’ve finally stopped saying we’re a young team. These kids are actually a team now, playing for each other, and really developing.”
Pro sports is one large Venn diagram, so there’s been plenty of Hamilton intersections in King’s playing and coaching careers.
He was playing for Toronto when Hamiltonian-to-the-marrow Pat Quinn took over the Leafs and they went to the 1999 East Conference final together. During part of his run with the Marlies, he worked closely with Toronto executive Steve Staios, who skated from Hamilton into 1,001 NHL games; he coached Hamilton’s Spencer Abbott with the Marlies and IceHogs in the seasons Abbott played his only two NHL games; his immediate boss, IceHogs GM Mark Bernard played a year behind him in the Hamilton Huskies system; King’s son DJ played for Staios in Hamilton.
So, naturally, Entwistle’s first and current pro coach would be King.
“MacKenzie is a standup citizen,” King says. “And I believe he’s going to have a real nice career in the NHL. It was great the Hawks gave him an NHL game this year to see where he’s at, but it’s also been great for him to come back here from the taxi squad and play some actual games.
“Everything about his game has taken off to the next level from last year. He’s a pro now. He knows what he needs to do to stay.”
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King says he’d probably have been a better pro player if he’d been able to coach first and says he tries to keep that in mind when working with the IceHogs. But, he says, he’s exactly where he’s meant to be, doing what he was meant to do.
“Things happen for a reason. And here I am, a head coach in a great organization.”
