Call for Assistance

As USA Hockey celebrates its Hockey Week Across America, Tuesday's theme is Salute to Coaches. There's no better reference point than Fred Shero.
Shero won two Stanley Cups in seven seasons as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers during the 1970s. He is notable for all kinds of coaching firsts: He invented the morning skate, now a staple a.m. practice before a NHL night game. He was the earliest innovator of using film to study both his own team's performance and scout the opposition.

Ray Shero, Fred's son, has won his own Stanley Cup in 2008 as a general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins. He and the New Jersey Devils "parted ways" earlier this season; most hockey insiders expect to see him in another position soon. Ray was nine years old when his dad coached his first Flyers game.
When asked about which of his father's coaching firsts is most meaningful, Ray Shero answered "probably hiring the NHL's first assistant coach" on an episode of NHL.com's Executive Suite hosted by Deb Placey.

Ray Shero told the backstory to Placey: Flyers owner Ed Snider and executive vice president Keith Allen hired Shero before the 1971-72 season, giving the highly successful minor-league coach a chance at the NHL level he was not getting from his then-parent club, the New York Rangers. In Fred Shero's first season, Philly missed playoffs by one standings point-on a goal scored with four seconds left in the team's final regular season game.
Snider was not pleased. The following day Shero met with the owner and Allen. Snider aired out his frustration, then asked if Shero "had anything to say?"
"Yes," said Shero, "I would like to hire an assistant coach."
"What?!" said Snider.
"I need help," said Shero, matter-of-factly. When the coach left, Snider turned to Allen to say, "Do we fire him now or tomorrow? What is this? How stupid can [Shero] be?"
As it turned out, Allen smoothed over the request. Shero got his wish. For the 1972-73 season, the Flyers hired Mike Nykoluk as the NHL's first full-time assistant coach. Media members interpreted it as a lack of confidence in Shero's coaching acumen, but the Hall of Fame coach knew what he was doing. With Nykoluk (a long-time minor-league player) by his side, Shero guided the Flyers to their first-ever winning season. The following season, Philadelphia won the 1974 Stanley Cup and repeated the feat in 1975. The Flyers were the first Cup-winning team from the 1967-68 group of six expansion teams (doubling the NHL from the "Original Six" to 12 teams total with the "Next Six" joining.

"Look at the league now," said Ray Shero during the Executive Suite podcast. "Teams have up to four or five assistant coaches."
After missing the playoffs in 1971-72, Shero decided to coach his NHL players in a similar fashion to how he coached them during minor league days-by teaching systems of how to set up scoring chances, play defensively as a forward and create "puck support." He even wrote up his ideas complete with a coding system, creating a playbook of sorts for his team that players called the "Shero Bible." Nykoluk was essential to help teaching those systems during practices and reinforcing the learnings during games. Shero is credited with being the first coach to use systems rather than simply rely on the NHL-caliber skills of his players.
There are more Fred Shero innovations to inspire coaches across the hockey universe: One is introducing practice drills picked up from his era's powerful Soviet Union national team. Another was Shero's believe that top players could be scouted and signed from Europe.
Fred Shero died in 1990. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2013. Ray Shero spoke on his father's behalf and candidacy. The son added one little-known fact about his father, a veracious reader and consummate explorer of ideas. "As defenseman for the New York Rangers in the 1950s," Ray told the audience, "my dad became the first Rangers player to hold a New York City Public Library card."