Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Roy: ‘I don’t want to necessarily be the head coach’ in Colorado

Patrick Roy

The way Patrick Roy sees it, there shouldn’t be a boss-employee relationship between him and the Avalanche players.

“I don’t want to necessarily be the head coach of this team,” Roy told the Denver Post following the opening day of Colorado’s training camp. “I want to be their partners. I want to have an exchange with them, and feel they can have an open conversation with me on anything that we’re going to do.”

It’s an interesting approach.

Wednesday was a day heavy on instruction -- Roy routinely stopped practice and screamed “useless” when describing defensemen that stand around in front of the goal -- as the rookie bench boss began work with his team, one of the youngest in the NHL.

Colorado has the NHL’s youngest captain, 20-year-old Gabriel Landeskog -- and will have one of the league’s youngest players when Nathan MacKinnon, who just turned 18 on Sept. 1, makes his NHL debut.

Other members of the kiddie corps include two 22-year-olds, Matt Duchene and Ryan O’Reilly, who are expected to shoulder a major load offensively.

All told, the club only has seven guys -- Alex Tanguay, PA Parenteau, David Van Der Gulik, Jan Hejda, Cory Sarich, Nate Guenin and JS Giguere -- who are 30 or older, but Roy is looking forward to the challenge of instructing the younger players.

“We did a lot of teaching today, but I enjoyed that a lot,” Roy said. “I enjoyed what I saw.

“I was very impressed with our game today.”