Seidel: Blashill, Babcock share many coaching traits

GRAND RAPIDS – Jeff Blashill was lying in bed and the phone rang. It was a 248 area code, a number he didn't recognize. But it was a call that would change his life.

"I had a fairly young baby — he was under 1 — and he had a rough night," Blashill said.

Blashill had just signed a five-year contract extension as the hockey coach at Western Michigan. He planned to stay in Kalamazoo for 10 years or so, after buying a house on a golf course and sinking $100,000 into a renovation project.

Blashill let the call go to voicemail. When he eventually listened to it, it was Red Wings coach Mike Babcock. Out of the blue. "His message was, he didn't know me," Blashill said. "But he had an assistant coaching position open and he had heard a lot of good things about me and wanted to get to know me."

Blashill called him back and might as well have been talking to himself, because their voices sound so much alike. They have a similar accent, share some of the same hand gestures and repeat some of the same phrases.

That day, he drove to Babcock's house and started the interview process.

"I think one of the reasons why Mike hired me is because we have real similar outlook on how you play hockey," Blashill said. "I think we are both principle-based coaches. Let's give our guys a framework. They are allowed to make plays outside of that framework, but let's make sure they have a framework and principles to play by."

Quick pause: If you close your eyes as Blashill talks, I swear it sounds like Babcock talking.

"I think we both want to play fast in all areas of the ice," Blashill continued. "We want to be out of our D zone. We want to transition up the ice fast. We want to be aggressive. I would say this for sure, both of us believe that taking time and space away from your opponent is the best defense in the end. Having the puck the whole night is your best defense."

Blashill had an out in his WMU contract if he was hired as an NHL assistant, and he jumped at the opportunity.

Now, here comes the surprising part: That was only four years ago.

After a year as an assistant coach with the Wings and a wildly successful three-year run as the head coach of the Grand Rapids Griffins, Blashill is the leading candidate to replace Babcock as the head coach of the Wings. Babcock himself is endorsing Blashill.

Blashill is the perfect choice — and not just because he is basically a younger, less-experienced version of Babcock, minus the hard-edged personality. Blashill checks all of the boxes you want in a coach. Well, all of them but NHL head-coaching experience.

He is demanding, a hard worker, highly prepared, detail-oriented, intelligent, a tremendous communicator, able to motivate, confident, even-keeled under pressure, loyal, able to make adjustments on the bench, focused, a proven winner and a coach whose players would run through a sheet of Plexiglas for him.

Ask anyone who has spent some time with Blashill, and they all come back to the same phrase: He just gets it. All of it. How to handle players. How to prepare for games. How to deal with the media. How to talk to the front office. How to develop players. And how to treat those who work under him with respect. He even lets someone videotape his pregame speeches and put them online (Youtube.com/griffvision).

"He's awesome," said Grand Rapids Griffins equipment manager Brad Thompson, who has worked under 10 coaches. "He's just a good guy, a great guy. I probably respect him the most of any coach, just for the fact that he doesn't look at us as the schleps or the grunts of the team."

Other than a lack of head coaching experience in the NHL, what's Blashill's biggest weakness?

It might be his golf game. "His golf game is not as good as he thinks it is and that's what gets him into trouble," Ferris State hockey coach Bob Daniels said, with a laugh.

Three of Blashill's friends said the same thing. They feel comfortable teasing "Blash" — as they call him — because he's that kind of guy. Personable. Friendly. Approachable. A player's coach.

OK. So that is where he differs from Babcock, who has never been called a player's coach in his life.

And now, Blashill is on the verge of becoming an NHL coach, if not with the Wings, then with somebody else, because of a series of calculated, risky decisions that have turned out perfectly.

A leap of faith

Blashill was born in Detroit. "Birth year 1973," he says, as only a hockey guy would say. And that brings us to the first leap of faith, which was actually taken by his father, Jim, a Detroit police officer, who worked as a street cop during the 1967 riots.

Jim was a cop for 10 years in Detroit and went to night school to get a bachelor's degree at Wayne State and a master's degree at Michigan State because he wanted to teach.

In 1975, Jim Blashill took a leap of faith, deciding to leave Detroit and start teaching criminal justice at Lake Superior State in Sault Ste. Marie. "I took about a 50% pay cut, going from a sergeant in Detroit to Lake State," Jim Blashill said. "We lived on campus and could walk to the rink. I figured it was worth 10 points in their IQ, just living on campus."

It was hockey heaven for Jeff and his younger brother Tim.

The Lake Superior State hockey team lived a couple of houses away, and the boys would play street hockey with the college kids. "Our childhood was really unique," Tim Blashill said. "The maintenance staff would make a rink, as well, out in our front lawn and they did it right."

Blashill played hockey on a travel team that featured seven future Division I athletes.

During an interview last week, Blashill was quick to credit every coach who he has ever worked with or played for, starting with his youth coaches. That's just how he is. Loyal and appreciative.

"My two youth coaches who had a big impact on me were Bob Brown and John Ferroni," Jeff Blashill said. "They had huge impacts on my life, in terms of work ethic and discipline. I was probably like a lot of kids. I don't want to say a punk, but a know-it-all kid. And they taught me a lot of life lessons."

That's why Blashill invited both of them to his 2013 Calder Cup party. Once a friend to Blashill, always a friend.

Better coach than player

Jeff Blashill was a solid Division I goaltender at Ferris State, but not a pro prospect. He only played a handful of games his senior year, while majoring in finance. "He did quite well at Ferris," Jim Blashill said. "A real good student. He had like two A-minuses and he thinks one of those was a mistake."

After graduating, Blashill became an assistant at Ferris State. "He had a good solid career for us, but I think he's a better coach than he was a goaltender," Daniels said.

Yes, they are strong friends, but they love to rip each other. That's what it is like in the Blashill inner circle.

Like most successful coaches, Blashill has taken bits of pieces from all the coaches he has met along the way.

He learned organization and detail from Daniels. "That was something that he is excellent at," Blashill said. "He's a real smart hockey mind, so I learned a lot of different hockey ideas. We are still friends and talk a lot."

After coaching at Ferris State for four years, Blashill went to Miami of Ohio. Enrico Blasi was the head coach and Blashill and Chris Bergeron (now head coach at Bowling Green) were the assistants. "That was a unique situation there," Blashill said. "I think we were all in our 20s. We got a chance to learn a ton together, how to bring an organization from good to great."

Hmm. Good to great? Red Wings fans are starting to salivate.

"We got an opportunity through a lot of mistakes, through a long learning process, to get that program where it is today, which is one of the elite programs in college hockey," Blashill said.

Head coach with a Range Rover

Now, here's the funny part.

Blashill, 41, has spent more time as a college assistant than he has as a head coach at any level. He spent four years as an assistant at Ferris State and six years at Miami. "I had a great job at Miami," he said. "It was secure. I was making good money."

But he was itching to become a head coach.

Enter Paul Skjodt, who saw something special in Blashill. Skjodt saw a head coach in the making.

"It was a gut feeling," Skjodt said. "It was the way he carried himself. He was so impressive. His coaching skills were phenomenal."

Skjodt tried to pull him away from Miami to coach the Indiana Ice in the United States Hockey League. The negotiations went on for two months. Skjodt was offering a two-year deal for about $75,000 with bonuses. But Blashill was afraid he might get fired by Christmas. "I had a history of that, because I picked the wrong guys," Skjodt said.

It was down to crunch time, 24 hours before the USHL draft, and Skjodt sweetened the deal. He gave Blashill the use of his used Range Rover for the next two years. "That sort of put him over the top," Skjodt said. "He had never had a nice car, right?"

That's what convinced Blashill to make the jump to leave college and become a head coach in the USHL. A Range Rover.

Blashill might be a player's coach, but he can also be tough. He guided the Ice into the playoffs in his first season, but trouble awaited. One of the team's star players broke a rule — Skjodt would not offer specifics — and Blashill disciplined the player immediately. "He didn't question himself," Skjodt said. "He knew, if he didn't do it, he would lose the rest of the team. I respected the fact that he did it."

Blashil led the Ice to the USHL championship in his first season. "He won the Cup for us, in the first year, with a team that didn't have as much talent as other teams in the league," Skjodt said. "Obviously, he is a winner. The family, the wife, they are just fantastic people. They treat people the right way."

He doesn't panic

After two years with the Ice, Blashill jumped to Western Michigan, which he turned into a winner in just one season. And he planned to stay there, seriously, he did. Blashill and his wife, Erica (his college sweetheart) have three children and they were about to set down roots until Babcock called.

Over the last four years, Babcock became a mentor and a close friend to Blashill. They talked several times a week, and Babcock gave him all kinds of advice from strategy to what to say at a team meeting during a rough patch. The more they talked, the more the two teams became aligned.

Now, the Griffins and the Red Wings run almost identical systems. And Blashill has used the entire Red Wings organization — the executives and coaches and former players — as a giant resource system.

"Over time, it has melded," Blashill said last week, just a few minutes after Chris Chelios walked out of his office. "I think the core habits are very similar. It's exactly how I want to coach. I'm not told I have to coach this way. My demand of our players is the same demand as (Mike's) players."

Here is the most amazing things about what Blashill has done in Grand Rapids: In the biggest games, under the most pressure, the Griffins have won. His teams are 5-1 when playing elimination games.

And his teams never give up. This year, in the Western Conference Quarterfinals against Toronto, the Griffins became the 11th team in AHL history to win a best-of-five series after trailing 0-2. (Which is nothing new. Blashill actually did the same thing in 2010 with Indiana.)

"He's calm and focused," said Brian Lashoff, who played under both Babcock and Blashiff this season. "I've been in situations where we are down big in games or a series. And there is no panic. When you got a coach who is like that and confident, that feeds off on the players. He does a good job of instilling that in us, when things get tight."

Why have the Griffins been so successful? Blashill is quick to credit the Red Wings' scouting department. But the players in Grand Rapids are quick to credit Blashill, who repeats a constant message to his team, from the start of the season through the end.

"He puts it on us to try to get better every day," goaltender Thomas McCollum said. "He tells us that greatness is a daily choice. You are either going to get better or you are going to get worse."

In last three years, McCollum has heard that message thousands of times.

And the odds are Blashill will be taking that message to Detroit.

Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @seideljeff.

Meet Jeff Blashill

Who: Grand Rapids Griffins coach and the front-runner to be the next Red Wings coach.

Age: 41.

From: Sault Ste. Marie. His father was a Lake Superior State professor.

College: Played goalie at Ferris State (1994-98).

Coaching career: Ferris State assistant (1999-2002), Miami (Ohio) assistant (2002-08), Indiana Ice coach/GM (2008-10), Western Michigan coach (2010-11), Red Wings assistant (2011-12), Griffins coach (2012-present).

Notable: In Blashill's first season with the Ice, he won the Clark Cup for the USHL championship. In his only season at WMU, he led the Broncos to the NCAA tournament and their best season in 15 years. In his first season with the Griffins, they won the AHL's Calder Cup.

Family: Wife, Erica; children, Teddy, Josie and Owen.

His time in Grand Rapids

■2013 Calder Cup (Griffins' first championship in 17 seasons).

■Two Midwest Division titles (2013 and 2015), plus one second-place finish (2014, by a single point).

■2013-14 AHL Coach of the Year.

■Coached in the 2014 AHL All-Star Classic.

■Griffins have reached the second round of the Calder Cup playoffs in three straight years (a franchise first).

■Two conference finals appearances in three years.

■3-0 in winner-take-all playoff games.

■5-1 when facing playoff elimination, including 5-0 at home.

■In 2015 Western Conference quarterfinals against Toronto, the Griffins became the 11th team in AHL history to win a best-of-five series after trailing 0-2.

■7-1 series record in the playoffs, with the one loss being to eventual 2014 champion Texas. Grand Rapids is the first AHL team to win seven playoff series during a three-year span since the Hershey Bears won back-to-back Calder Cups in 2009 and 2010.

■Posted a franchise-record 19-game point streak (15-0-3-1) from Feb. 4 to March 20, 2015.

■First coach in franchise history to qualify for the playoffs in three consecutive seasons and to lead the Griffins to three 90-point seasons.

■Not counting NHL players who came for conditioning, has sent 24 players on to the NHL during his three years in Grand Rapids.

Source: Grand Rapids Griffins