Islanders new coach Capuano is ready to shift his focus
The first change Jack Capuano made before stepping on the IceWorks rink Monday was in his own approach.
The interim Islanders coach is making the change - quickly - from teaching and coaching the prospects he had in Bridgeport to trying to put the right combinations together to get some wins with the Islanders.
"My focus was totally on development. Now, you control ice time, minutes, everything, and it's all about winning some games here," Capuano said after his first practice with the Islanders. "Everybody has to be held accountable."
Like Scott Gordon, who was fired Monday morning after two-plus seasons as Islanders coach, Capuano has taken the long route to his first NHL head-coaching gig. The 44-year-old former defenseman has been focusing on development for over a decade.
After a playing career that started at the University of Maine - his younger brother, Dave, was a college teammate of Islanders general manager Garth Snow - Capuano, a 1984 fifth-round draft pick of the Maple Leafs, played four pro seasons.
He played only six NHL games with the Leafs, Canucks and Bruins, spending most of his time in the minors, including 14 games with the Islanders' then-AHL affiliate in Springfield, Mass., in the 1989-90 season, where he was briefly a teammate of current Islanders assistant coach Dean Chynoweth.
After Capuano retired, he began his coaching career in the East Coast Hockey League in 1996 in Tallahassee, Fla., eventually becoming the coach and GM of the Pee Dee Pride in Florence, S.C. He coached and/or managed the Pride from 1997-2005 before getting his only taste of NHL coaching.
Steve Stirling brought Capuano on to the Islanders' staff for the post-lockout 2005-06 season. Stirling, a college and minor-league lifer who had gotten his break when Mike Milbury fired Peter Laviolette before the 2003-04 season, didn't last the year, fired after 42 games and a 1-8-0 streak. Another assistant, Brad Shaw, finished out the season.
After that season, Milbury was moved up and Capuano moved down to Bridgeport, where he was first an assistant to Dan Marshall for the 2006-07 season, then promoted to head coach the following year.
He's had more than a few of the supporting cast of the current Islanders under his command the last three-plus seasons - Blake Comeau, Frans Nielsen and Andrew MacDonald to name a few.
"I know their capabilities, let's say," Capuano said. "I have a pretty good idea of most everyone's strengths and weaknesses. Today was a good day, we had good flow - we're not trying to throw too much new info out there."
A few players said that Capuano did throw some wrinkles into the system employed by Gordon - mostly to do with more east-west movement on the forecheck, more read-and-react, rather than the full-throttle style Gordon tried to get his players to use every game.
"We did the majority of what the Islanders have been doing, just a few things we did differently," Capuano said. "The main thing I talked to them about today is what's controllable and what's not. The things we can control are trust in one another, believing in one another and getting moving on the right foot."
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