‘He sees the game the right way’: Former NHL player Shane Doan talks NHL Seattle addition Dave Tippett

The group looking to bring an NHL expansion team to Seattle has brought on former Arizona Coyotes and Dallas Stars head coach Dave Tippett as a senior advisor. But what exactly is the Oak View Group getting with the addition of Tippett?

Former NHL forward Shane Doan, who spent the entirety of his 21-year career with the Coyotes organization, joined Brock Huard and Mike Salk on 710 ESPN Seattle to talk about what his former coach and mentor would bring to Seattle’s organization.

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“As a hockey guy, he understands the game and he sees the game the right way,” said Doan, who Tippett coached for eight seasons while the two were with Arizona. “But he’s got that personality that, when he enters the room, the demeanor kind of just demands attention. I really enjoyed my time with him and he’s a guy that’s capable of leading an organization and being the face of an organization and doing things the right way.”

While Doan could see Tippett as a coach with Seattle, he praised his ability to understand a team from an organization’s point of view. When Salk asked Doan to share a story about Tippett – something to help Seattle sports fans glean a bit of insight into his coaching style and ability – Doan shared the story from his first year with Tippett:

“He has the disposition of kind of being solemn and quiet and very reserved, and yet he’s got a great sense of humor and he loves to have fun with the guys,” Doan said. “My first year I had him was at the World Championships with Team Canada and he was an assistant coach. The following year we had Wayne Gretzky as our head coach (with the Coyotes) and he stepped down. And coming into training camp, which, this is unbelievable, we didn’t have a coach. And training camp was supposed to start and we weren’t sure who was supposed to be our coach… and I had mentioned Tipp, and Tipp had just been let go from Dallas so they talked about bringing him in.

“We’re like five days into training camp… and we’d finished 25 points out of a playoff spot; we were embarrassingly bad. And Tipp came in that year and we went from being 25 points out of the playoff spot to being third overall in the NHL. We finished with the highest points that we’d ever finished with as an organization. And I was sold, hook-line-and-sinker, on the ability of him to coach and manage a team. It was unbelievable what he did with that group, and the turnaround; he won Coach of the Year, and everything kind of went from there. It was absolutely phenomenal. And I really enjoyed getting to know him that year and that kind of was the start of my relationship with him. It showed his ability to take a team that wasn’t very good and instill a whole bunch of discipline and belief in the group, and kind of turned us around.”

You can hear the full segment with Doan on Brock and Salk in this podcast of Tuesday’s show.

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