Andrei Nikolishin: telling player that he should leave the team is the most difficult thing

Learning along with children

You have not announced that your career as a player was over. Therefore, some might have been totally surprised with your appointment as Traktor head coach. How surprising was it for you?
I don’t think it was that surprising. Of course, it was totally spontaneous and was not planned, even though I heard in the spring of 2014 that Traktor management was looking for the new head coach. As far as I understand, my name was already in the hat back then.

Have you been preparing yourself for this line of work? Did the thought of becoming coach ever cross your mind?
I don’t think I ever have been, but throughout my active player career I have been writing down interesting exercises or nuances of the game. Everything that I liked and I thought was original went there. I knew it would be useful one day, but I never realized when and where. Everything I wrote down, I tested on my children; I have been helping them with their training as well as the coaches of their teams.

I refused to work as Karri Kivi’s assistant

How did you find out about your appointment?
Sergei Gomolyako called me. He and I met in Moscow at Dynamo vs. Traktor game. We watched it together, and then, in a couple of days, he called me and offered me to be Karri Kivi’s assistant. Gomolyako thought Kivi was not successful in communicating with the players. I refused.

Why?
It would be wrong, in my opinion. Every coach has their own vision of their game, has different ambitions. I know myself – I would soon be inserting my two cents here and there, and this would have been unethical and plain wrong. However, I can’t say one bad thing about Karri Kivi – he is indeed a very skilled coach. Vitali Yachmenev and I later watched the tapes of all training sessions. Quite frankly, we haven’t changed much compared to what he had been doing. His chief problem was that he could not understand that some of Russian hockey players do not act as professionals.

Do you remember the moment when you first walked into the locker room in this capacity?
Yes, and it was a totally different feeling than when you are a player. I played with half of the team not too long ago, but now they were going to call me by the name and patronymic, and my role was totally different. But, I am not too sentimental in this regard.

What about the first game?
We played against Atlant on home ice, got a win. After that, I said to myself: ‘Well, now you’re a coach’. I didn’t feel any itch to get back to the ice – I had already made a decision. After the victory, Deron Quint brought me the winning puck.

Players are responsible for keeping good physical shape

Rumor has it, you had to resort to ferocious measures to discipline the team.
It is true to some extent, and it has more to do with their life outside the ice.

Did you lock the team at the training camp?
No, I never liked them myself. I think it is an atavism.

What was wrong then?
Well, for instance, I had to clear the locker room from ‘wrong’ food like cookies, chocolate or nuts. Half of the team was overweight! And this happened with a well-balanced training regime. I literally had to explain what they should and what they should not eat. Most of them already know that, but I still had to do it. Do you really think we sent people to Chelmet just for fun?
I already told them that things would never be the same, and if they come to training camp with excess weight... 

Will they be fined?
No, their contracts will be terminated.

That’s hard.
What else can we do? It’s their responsibility to stay fit, to have a certain percentage of fat in their body etc.

Reputation and sense of fullness

Towards the end of the season, I started to realize that the things I wanted to see from my team, I did them at once back when I was a player; here, we had to work for weeks or even months to implement that. It is not as much team’s fault as it is mine; the ability to get your point across and make the players do what you want them to is essentially the art of coaching.
The first four or five games were a complete mess; the team could not quite understand what we wanted from them. They could have followed the game plan for ten minutes, or one period, or 30 minutes, but never for an entire game. It was hard to watch, especially after we repeated things several times…

As an old story about a teacher goes – told them once, twice, finally understood yourself what I was talking about, but students didn’t.
Yeah, that’s like that. I was totally surprised by the fact that many players on the team had never played according to well-organized system.

Half of them were part of Belousov’s team, and Valeri Konstantinovich is known for systematizing his teams.
This is true, but our system is totally different from Belousov’s.

This means that the players who had played three years based on one system had to regroup three times within six months. Not everyone is capable of doing it, especially this fast.
It’s also true, but this is their job! The level of the team is determined by their ability to regroup on the fly, sometimes multiple times throughout one game. We are also striving to find this ability. During this season, however, it sometimes took one week to get something basic across.
Coach should help a player evolve, but before that, he has to acquire basic skills, and this is where the problem lies – our hockey schools are sometimes unable to give them these skills. However, players themselves are also to blame because no coach can teach how to skate with the stick.

Are you sure it should be said in public?
There’s nothing wrong with it. The team knows it, and their task is to get better, even if they are in their late thirties.

Is this why the 39-year-old Deron Quint was the most consistent defenseman in Traktor?
Maybe. The elder players are easier to work with as they tend to grasp things quicker. Ruzicka has gotten a lot better because he grasps the ideas very quickly.

But you sent him to Chelmet at some point.
That’s because he played horrendous hockey. When I became the head coach, he did not seem to understand what was going on. He is a quality player, but something was wrong with him. This ‘trip’ to Chelmet helped him to get back into the thick of things.

What about the Russians?
(thinking)...You know, I don’t want to offend anybody, but I feel like they are…full. This sense of fullness doesn’t allow them to evolve. Their thinking is: ‘Well, this coach guy, he is going to get tired of shouting, but he will have put me on the lineup anyway because he doesn’t have a choice’.
This is a universal problem. Coaches often exchange opinions, and many point out that they encountered the same problem. Motivation, or rather lack thereof, is a huge issue. Tell me, is it so hard to go to the crease to screen the goalie?

They get hit there.
They should – it’s their job!

What was your source of motivation in the NHL?
Simple – I was either on the lineup, or I wasn’t.

But in NHL contracts, there also exists a fixed salary clause.
And? Who is going to offer you a new lucrative one if you keep riding the pine? What we are trying to get across to our players is that their reputation is running before them. Sooner or later, and in reality, it is rather the former than the latter, it will come to KHL. If you’re lazy, if you lack discipline or have alcohol abuse history, management of KHL teams will offer you worse contracts. Players still can’t understand that it works this way.

You talk a lot about motivation. Aren’t victories the best motivator?
...You know, not every player wants to win.

Like, money is trickling into my pocket, and I don’t give a crap about the rest?
Yes, it often happens, and it oftentimes has nothing to do with the age, but rather with how you had been brought up and the environment you play in. We talked at length about the NHL. The competition there is ferocious – either eat or be eaten. There is no need to motivate the guys in NHL, but it’s often not the case here in Russia.
Fortunately, many of Traktor players are hungry for victories. It’s enough for me to say a word, and they understand everything.

I should have replaced Garnett with Demchenko when the time was right

Have you analyzed the recently ended season?
Yes, I have.

Do you think you have made a lot of mistakes?
Of course I made mistakes. The most notable of them was in game 2 against Sibir. I should have replaced Garnett with Demchenko when Sibir got a chance at penalty shot. This was the first thing that came to mind, but I didn’t. Then a goal, then another, these three shorthanded goals by Sibir…we had a shot in this game, trailing two goals but tying it up, but it didn’t work out.

Many thought Traktor could have advanced instead of Sibir.
I agree, we could have and should have. Sibir deserves credit though – it is a great team that was in better physical shape and Traktor was. I think we lacked confidence in power play game – we should have put more attention to this aspect of the game.

Why did you put the D-man Atyushov in the center of the fourth line, and not those who specialize as centers, like Kruchinin or Zavarukhin?
It’s simple. Zavarukhin is somewhat slow and tries to compensate this by playing safer game while the team tries to play in a more dynamic fashion. Yes, Atyushov is a defenseman, but we already built a certain system, and he understood his role perfectly. I know some of the fans don’t like Vitali, and sometimes he deserved it, but he pulled off this task. He knows what he should work on; he is actually one of the best when it comes to professional attitude to his job.

Don’t you think you put too much pressure on Garnett? Goalies sometimes love to feel themselves irreplaceable…
He can feel himself irreplaceable, that’s fine by me, but I also wanted more professionalism. Overweight was also his problem, and sometimes he was spent in the closing moments of hockey games. He knew about the problem, but could not do his best to solve it.

Rumor has it you once outran Igor Velichkin at one of the training sessions. Is it true?
No, I actually lost. We ran 10 laps, and I lost – he beat me by 10 feet or so. Had I been training more frequently, I would have beaten him (smiles).

Should he beashamed?
Of course. That was the whole point.

When will you not be able to run 10 straight laps?
There will be other things that I will be able to do (squinting).

The most difficult thing for any coach is tell a player he leaves the team

Despite one season under your belt, you are still a young coach, simply due to the fact that you will soon be managing your first offseason. What do you think?
I am confident in my ability, in the ability of my players and assistants.

Confident in your players? In one of recent interviews you said that you would keep only the half of the players, right?
Yes. We will have to build the team around those who are going to be left, others will join us. You have to understand – those whom we no more see as part of the team made it like this.

How about the second chance?
There were a lot of second chances. It’s not a kindergarten, for God’s sakes. Each and every one of them are professionals, and they have to be responsible for what they do.

Are you as demanding to yourself as you are to your players?
Yes, absolutely. If I weren’t so demanding to myself, I would not have been able to be the same to the team.