Jon Cooper has one quality as a hockey head coach that proved irresistible to the Tampa Bay Lightning of the National Hockey League.
It seems everything he touches turns to gold.
Cooper's winning ways started in 1999 as a high school coach and he continued to rack up national titles in the U.S. junior ranks and most recently in the American Hockey League with the Lightning's top farm team. Last year, he led the team to the league championship, winning the Calder Cup.
Now he's the top man behind the bench for the Lightning, replacing Guy Boucher, who was fired Sunday after 2 1/2 seasons at the helm.
"There is no other team in hockey that I would rather be coaching than the Tampa Bay Lightning," Cooper said in a statement. "It's quite a tribute to [Lightning general manager] Steve Yzerman, [owner] Jeff Vinik and the organization they are building that they are proud to promote from within. I look forward to getting to know the players and getting to work right away."
He won't have much time for that. The Lightning played at home to Buffalo on Tuesday and will have two days to practice with Cooper before they host the New Jersey Devils in his first NHL game Friday night.
Cooper, a 45-year-old native of Prince George, was an obvious candidate for the job. The Syracuse Crunch (39-18-3-5) are setting the pace in the AHL with a league-best 86 points, picking up where they left off last season when they were known as the Norfolk Admirals. Tampa moved its AHL affiliate team to Syracuse in the off-season.
"He has had success at every level he has coached and is extremely familiar with our organization, as well as our players," said Yzerman, in a team release. "He has a tremendous record at all levels, and we feel he is ready to make the move to the NHL."
Under Cooper's watch in 2011-12, the Admirals not only won the Calder Cup but set a league record with 29 straight wins. Cooper also won league coach of the year honours.
"Initially, when we were gathering names, you talk to people around hockey that we respect and ask for names, and Coop's name came up," Yzerman told the Tampa Tribune.
"You look at his record and say, 'This is interesting, we should talk to him.' Then, once we interviewed him, he really makes a good impression. He's a bright guy, he's very personable and has some good ideas. And after meeting with him and seeing his record, I wouldn't even say it was a gamble. He was a coach with a good record and good track record working with kids.''
One of those "kids" is 20-year-old old right winger Brett Connolly, who left the Prince George Cougars last year to play a full season for the Lightning as a rookie. This year in 64 games with Syracuse, Connolly has 26 goals and 30 assists for 56 points, seventh-best in the AHL, and he might get a call-up as the Lightning struggle to improve a record that's near the bottom in the Eastern Conference.
Copper will also get reacquainted with Lightning forward Dana Tyrell, a former Cougar captain playing in his first full NHL season now that he's recovered from a series of knee injuries. Former Cats defenceman Eric Brewer also plays for Tampa Bay.
Ten players on the current Lightning roster skated for Cooper in the AHL.
Cooper's rise to the top of the coaching chain can be traced back two decades, when his application to coach the Williams Lake Mustangs in the BCHL in the late 1990s was rejected. He decided to go back to the books to earn his law degree at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich., and in 1999 he led Lansing Catholic Central to its first regional high school hockey title in 25 years. In 2000, he took over the bench of the famed HoneyBaked midget program and the following season made the jump to the junior B level with the Metro Jets of the Central Hockey League, winning the Tier 3 national title in 2002.
Cooper was hired in 2003 by the expansion Texarkana (Texas) Bandits of the North American (Junior) Hockey League and with the Bandits based in St. Louis won consecutive Tier 2 junior national championships in 2007 and 2008. That led to a job in the USHL, the top junior league in the U.S., in which he led the Green Bay Gamblers to the Tier 1 national championship in 2010, winning coach-of-the-year and GM-of-the-year trophies that season. The year he joined the Gamblers, in 2008-09, his team posted a record 52-point improvement over the previous year and jumped from worst to first. Cooper is the only coach ever to win national titles at all three levels of U.S. junior hockey.
