SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. – Gerard Gallant’s coaching achievements speak for themselves.
Championships in junior hockey (RBC Cup, two Quebec Major Hockey League titles with the Saint John Sea Dogs, a Memorial Cup in 2011, coach of the year honours in the ’Q, and a Jack Adams Award at the NHL level, for his work with the Vegas Golden Knights after he helped guide the expansion team to the Stanley Cup finals this past spring.
But there’s one thing that’s missing for the 54-year-old native of Summerside: hockey’s most coveted prize.
“I’ve never won a Stanley Cup as a player or coach,” says Gallant, who is the marquee guest at this year’s Scott Weeks Celebrity golf tournament, to be held Friday at Abercrombie Golf Club.
Winning the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s best coach was nice (“very rewarding” he says), but the sting of coming up short in the Stanley Cup final against the Washington Capitals took some time to fade.
“Once that first week’s over, we could look back at what the team did, the incredible success we had,” he says, (but) “if we would have won the Stanley Cup, it would have been the greatest upset in sports history.”
The Golden Knights were getting ready for their first-ever home opener last fall when a gunman killed 58 people at a music festival on the Las Vegas strip.
Hockey was an afterthought and the Knights organization pitched in help the community; visiting hospitals, meeting with first responders, trying to help out with the healing process.
“All of a sudden, everything changed,” Gallant remembers. “When the shooting happened, it was like ‘let’s take care of our city’.”
The Knights were essentially a group of castoffs, players nobody else wanted. But they started the franchise’s inaugural season by winning eight of its first nine games, and as the hockey world kept waiting for them to come back to earth, Vegas kept winning – all the way into early June – before they lost in five games to the Capitals.
“We went into the year thinking ‘let’s have a good, hard-working year’, but when the season started, we were playing good hockey, beating real good hockey teams. We knew we had something special and we enjoyed it right to the last day.”
Ed MacLaren, one of the celebrity golf tournament organizers, has known Gallant since they played Junior A hockey against each other nearly 40 years ago on P.E.I.
“He’s a down to-earth guy and he hasn’t changed,” said MacLaren. “He hasn’t forgotten his roots. He’s a Maritimer, plain and simple.”
