Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
The past 10 months have been rather head-spinning for the Hartford Wolf Pack.
It started on a Sunday morning last November, with the team in the middle of a three-in-three weekend. Hopes were high for the club, which was sitting at 7-3-1-0. Then came word that head coach Kris Knoblauch was off to the NHL, hired as the new head coach of the Edmonton Oilers. With the Wolf Pack just hours away from a matinee meeting with the Providence Bruins, assistant coach Steve Smith stepped in for Knoblauch in an interim role.
Two and a half weeks later, captain Jonny Brodzinski earned what proved to be a permanent recall to the New York Rangers. Other key players, like Adam Edstrom, Matt Rempe, Riley Nash and Louis Domingue, would be lost for long stretches due to recalls or injuries.
A late-season slump down the stretch put Hartford’s postseason hopes in danger, but Smith’s team pulled out of that slide, qualified for the Calder Cup Playoffs, and won two series before falling to Hershey in the division finals.
On June 27, the Rangers went to the NCAA ranks and hired Grant Potulny as their new AHL head coach. Potulny, 44, spent seven seasons as head coach at Northern Michigan University, and eight years before that as an assistant at his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.
Potulny had moved directly into coaching in 2009 following his retirement from a playing career that included five seasons spent mostly in the AHL as a dependable forward in Binghamton, Hershey, Springfield, San Antonio and Norfolk. He had considerable success at Minnesota, including six regular-season conference titles and two Frozen Four appearances. At Northern Michigan, he went 128-113-7 and reached three conference championship games. Internationally, Potulny served as an assistant coach for the United States four times at the IIHF World Junior Championship, winning gold medals in 2013 and 2017 and a bronze in 2018.
With his two sons – 19-year-old Jackson and 17-year-old Owen – now off pursuing their own hockey careers, Potulny and his family had an opportunity to explore new options. Potulny and Hartford general manager Ryan Martin had built a longstanding relationship through their work together with USA Hockey.
The Rangers organization is new, as is the task of coaching pros, but the fit felt comfortable for Potulny.
“There’s a lot of familiarity for me with the team and the organization,” he explained.
Potulny knows the pro game from his own playing days. Now he’ll be seeing the player-coach relationship from the other side. His Hartford roster will likely be a mix of rookies and other young prospects as well as older, established players. It will be a different dynamic from the college game.
“I think as you start dealing with older players and older people, you have to have a partnership,” Potulny said. “There has got to be some give-and-take on both sides of that, so I think forming strong relationships with players is going to be important. Trying to get to a point as soon as we can where they trust what I’m doing, and they trust me, I think that’s really important.
“Players who are at this level, they want to continue to strive and get better, and we’re going to spend a lot of time on development here. As a player those are things that you love to hear because it’s giving you a chance to further your hockey journey. They are looking for structure. They want to be coached. They want to be pushed.”
During his own playing days, Potulny had his own coaching examples, playing for a couple of AHL Hall of Famers in John Paddock and Bruce Boudreau. It was an education.
“Coaches that I played for,” Potulny said, “they had a plan. They had an itinerary. I knew what I was going to get every day when I got there. Consistency. It’s hard enough to be a professional player. If there are ways for to make other parts of their day less complicated… those are things that I always really appreciated from coaches.”
Paddock’s soft-spoken approach made a quick impression on Potulny coming out of college and provided lessons that he will take with him to Hartford this fall.
“John, he just had a really good way about him,” Potulny recounted. “He had really good relationships with our veteran players. He was very thoughtful. When he did [something], you knew that he put a lot of thought into it. As a coach, you’ve got to make sure that your voice doesn’t get old with just talking the talk. John was a master at that.
“When he did say something, it was very meaningful.”
And so with all of the change that has come through Hartford in the past 10 months, Potulny can bring some of those same qualities with him to the Wolf Pack. Undoubtedly this season will bring its own set of challenges and opportunities, and he is eager to lead a group of young players learning to adjust to pro hockey’s highs and lows.
Whether it’s an early-season run or a late-season playoff push, Potulny has a succinct message for his players.
“I have a saying: ‘We get to, not we have to.’”
TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams has been on the American Hockey League beat for nearly two decades for outlets including NHL.com, Sportsnet, TSN, The Hockey News, SiriusXM NHL Network Radio and SLAM! Sports, and was most recently the co-host of The Hockey News On The ‘A’ podcast. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.