LA's most interesting (and best) coach

In the December issue of Los Angeles magazine, Paul Brownfield (in his first piece) profiles Kings coach Darryl Sutter. The Canadian rancher-hockey lifer comes across as a thinker and complex strategist who turned down an Ivy League education to become one of the six Sutter brothers to play in the National Hockey League. His terse post-game media availabilities and the entertaining facial tics he fills the silences with are among his most identifying traits, for those Angelenos who know of Sutter at all, but what he's increasingly famous for in the sports world is for taking an underperforming team and winning two Stanley Cups in his first 2½ seasons in Los Angeles.

Excerpt:

Sutter is a solidly built man with a fine shock of gray-white hair and a nose that can appear to overhang his upper lip like the eaves of a roof. He took over as head coach three years ago this month, and he has since turned the Kings into a play-off monster, winning two Stanley Cups with a franchise that had hardly won anything. The play-offs, too, forced Sutter to star in his own postgame one-man show as the prairie oddball whose twisted facial expressions and baritone haiku-like answers to reporters’ queries offer few clues about what he thinks or feels. Sutter’s silences are beyond intimidating. At first blush they can be a bit strange….

In 1984, when Darryl was a forward with the Chicago Blackhawks, he took a puck to the face that broke his nose, cheekbone, and left orbital bone, which in turn caused his eye to fall into his sinus cavity. Thirty years later that eye sits on a piece of plastic and wiring, and if you pinch him on the cheek, he won’t feel it. “It’s kind of weird, actually,” Sutter said, explaining that the nerve damage means he feels only “a tingle” when he bites his lip.

Injuries—even ones as severe as Sutter’s—don’t set you apart in hockey. The idea of sacrifice, particularly playing through extreme physical pain, is woven into the warrior culture of the sport. So Sutter surprised me when he said he had disappointed his mother after high school by turning down college scholarships to several Ivy League schools in order to play in the junior leagues and then professional hockey in Japan. Lombardi, the Kings’ GM, had told me Sutter passed on an offer of a full ride from Princeton; when I asked Sutter, he said that Harvard and Yale had recruited him as well. “I had years in high school where the only B I got was in physical education,” he said. That he passed up an Ivy League education reveals something fundamental about the man Kings fans are relying on to keep them in trophies: He is a lot more than what he appears to be. It is for outsiders to write him off as an incomprehensible, Fargo-esque character. The players swear by Sutter just as Sutter stands by them—a chemistry that means he gets the most out of his roster on more nights than he doesn’t. They are, you know, a team.

Sutter was asked if he had gotten to know LA at all, and he replied no. When he's here it's just to coach hockey; home is in Viking, Alberta. Besides, he says, like most of the Kings players, "I don’t live in Los Angeles; I live in Manhattan Beach.”

Dustin Snipes took the pictures for the Los Angeles story.

Previously on LA Observed:
Kings and their mad genius coach