Just under four years removed from his NHL playing career, Mike Sullivan made his Olympic debut as an assistant coach for the U.S. men’s hockey team in Turin, Italy, at the 2006 Winter Games.
He was 37 and in the midst of his first NHL head coaching gig with his home team, the Boston Bruins.
Sullivan was closer to his time as a player than he was to an established coaching career, but then-Team USA GM Don Waddell cited his “knowledge and passion” of the game for why he was added to the coaching staff.
Led by Peter Laviolette, Team USA finished in eighth place and won just one game in that Olympic tournament.
As Sullivan prepares to return to Italy — this time as the U.S. bench boss — for the Milan Cortina Winter Games, the now-Rangers head coach had a clear favorite memory from his first Olympic experience.
“The games were great, exciting and all of that, but it was such a privilege to be able to stay in the Olympic Village,” Sullivan told The Post from inside his office at MSG Training Center. “And you go to the cafeteria and they have these long tables with the flags of the respective countries on the tables. All the American athletes and coaches would sit at the American flags, and Canada would sit at their tables, and Germany would sit at their tables. So to have the opportunity to go in there and grab something to eat, you could go have lunch and maybe you’re sitting next to a bobsledder, or, you know, a downhill skier, and you strike up a conversation. I found that to be fascinating and just really rewarding, and it makes you realize that when you go over there, that you’re part of a team that’s bigger than your sport.
“A lot of these other respective sports, they train and prepare for years for the opportunity that’s there. Hockey is a little bit of a different dynamic. We’re participating in the NHL, right? And then we go over as a team, and obviously that’s a unique experience to represent your country and all of those things. That was the biggest thing that I took away from it that I cherish to this day.”
Logistics in Milan will prevent Sullivan from staying in the Olympic Village this time, but that is far from the only difference surrounding his return to the greatest international stage in sports.
The now-57-year-old comes into the tournament, which is set to begin Wednesday, as one of the most seasoned and well-respected NHL coaches.
With back-to-back Stanley Cups on his résumé and a 10-year run with Canadian captain Sidney Crosby and the Penguins, Sullivan has been charged with leading the most promising American men’s hockey team in recent memory back to Olympic glory.
The players he’s coaching grew up on tales of the 1980 Miracle on Ice, the last time Team USA won gold.
Sullivan was less than a week away from turning 12 when Mike Eruzione scored the goal that gave the United States a 4-3 lead over the hardened Soviets.
USA Hockey is as well-equipped as it’s ever been in terms of the pool of talent it had to work with, and Sullivan is a felicitous choice to lead them.
“I think 20 years ago, Canada could almost put two teams together to compete,” he said. “And I think the United States is in that same conversation right now.”
And yet, Sullivan and USA general manager Bill Guerin are bringing almost the same team to Milan that they brought to Montreal and Boston for the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off last February.
Subtracting ex-Ranger Chris Kreider and the Blueshirts’ No. 1 defenseman Adam Fox, Team USA only has three newcomers in the Mammoth’s Clayton Keller, the Sabres’ Tage Thompson and the Ducks’ Jackson LaCombe, who replaced an injured Seth Jones.
Guerin cited the 4 Nations chemistry as one of his reasons, and Sullivan described it as a “competitive advantage” that all who were a part of it could feel.
The continuity of the team, from management, the coaching staff and the players, was valued.
“What I’ll tell you is everybody went in with an open mind,” Sullivan said. “A year in hockey is a long time, and a lot can happen. Young players emerge. Anything can happen. There was a due diligence process that was put in place. I think it’s our responsibility, first and foremost, all the players that have the opportunity to make this team deserve that.”
On their way to losing to Canada in overtime of the championship game in Boston last year, Team USA was able to learn a lot about its roster and at least three of the nations — Canada, Finland, Sweden — they could face at some point in the Olympic tournament.
Team USA did “a lot of legwork” going into the precursor to the Olympics, according to Sullivan.
There was also an “extensive” debrief afterwards.
They used it to map out their approach to the Olympic Games, while also planning periodic Zoom calls to discuss certain matters throughout the regular season.
“Listen, this is a year later, things could change,” Sullivan said of using the 4 Nations lineups as a starting point. “The unique part of [the 4 Nations and Olympic] experiences is you don’t have the luxury of allowing time to watch something evolve and develop. You might put a line combination together and you can’t give it a couple of games to see if it’s going to click. I’ll give you an example, during the 4 Nations we had line combinations together and halfway through the game, we went to Plan B and we put the Tkachuk brothers [Matthew and Brady] with Jack Eichel. And that decision kind of was the catalyst for our transitioning to the team that we anticipated to have.
“We had talked about that leading up to it, but it wasn’t the way we started. But we had certainly talked about contingencies in the event that, ‘Hey, we don’t like what we see’ or, as I always say to you guys, sometimes a line combination makes sense from a complementary skill set standpoint on paper, but you don’t really know if it’s going to work until you see it. Sometimes that’s just the case. And when you get in these tournaments, where they’re over before they start, I mean, you blink your eyes and they’re over, you know? They just happen so fast.
“You don’t have the luxury of letting a line combination play out for three or four games. The whole tournament is like six. You’ve got to make decisions a lot quicker than you would if you were in the NHL.”
