New Islanders coach Patrick Roy can play the media game as well as anyone
Patrick Roy speaks to reporters after his first game as Islanders head coach on Jan. 21, 2024, at UBS Arena. Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer
Lou Lamoriello, Patrick Roy and Islanders players will be judged primarily by wins and losses (and Stanley Cups), as always.
But allow your friendly neighborhood sports media columnist a few observations from that angle of the weekend coaching change bombshell, if you will.
First, this: The fact that Lamoriello announced Roy’s hiring on Saturday without any whiff of a report or rumor about it coming is a shocking achievement in 2024.
For decades, Lamoriello has famously run one of the most leak-free operations in sports, but this sort of thing simply does not happen these days.
In an era in which “insiders” are spoon-fed information from agents, teams and leagues, Lamoriello does not play that game.
What made it even more remarkable was the identity of his target.
Feel free to say, “Nobody cares about hockey, Boomer,” and think that makes it easier to pull off something like this in that sport. But you would be wrong.
The NHL has “insiders” of its own, many of them Canada-based, and Roy is a huge star up north, especially in French-speaking areas.
His hiring caused a mad scramble of French-language journalists to descend on East Meadow for Sunday morning’s skate and Elmont for the game against Dallas.
Let’s just say UBS Arena is not a common stop on the Quebec sports media tour.
That has nothing to do with winning games or filling seats on Long Island, but it is an illustration of what has arrived here: an icon in French-Canadian hockey.
The appetite for discussion on this topic was so frantic that I found myself being interviewed Monday morning on Quebec sports radio, with real-time translation.
(I successfully used “bonjour” and “merci” in conversation but otherwise was just a hapless guy who took introductory French in 1979.)
All of which leads to the best media-related thing about Roy, which is that he is great at it, even though English is not his first language.
St. John’s Rick Pitino is the undisputed king of New York-area coach-talkers, as he is one of the best of all time at it. (He’s a Long Islander, so of course!)
But among area pro coaches and managers, the Islanders now have veered from No. 1 with Barry Trotz to last place with Lane Lambert and back to first with Roy.
You can and will say that you do not care about that sort of thing, an argument I have heard for decades when it comes to coaches and media relations.
But you do, because following a team with compelling characters always is more fun than the opposite.
And the Islanders themselves certainly do, because they have seats to fill and a franchise to market that always has been an underdog in business terms.
Lamoriello did not hire Roy for those reasons, but trust me, the folks in charge of the business end of the Islanders are ecstatic about the new guy, who graced back-to-back Newsday back pages.
For a guy who had not set foot in UBS Arena until Sunday and has no real ties to the Islanders or Long Island, he knew enough to wax nostalgic about the Stanley Cup years, to make repeated references to the fans and to charm reporters.
It has been a whirlwind, and Roy predicted he would sleep well on Sunday night.
He will be back in front of the microphones on Tuesday, when the Islanders host the defending Cup champion Golden Knights, then in a huge way when the Isles visit Montreal on Thursday in what will be a media spectacle.
In the long run, talk is cheap. I get it. But in the short run, Roy is gold.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
