Gennady Kurdin: “Nikita Kucherov worked with me when I was a child. And I “strangled” him to the max!

first coach Nikita Kucherov Gennady Kurdin said in a interview that the head coach Tampa John Cooper behaves properly with team leaders.

The Tampa Bay Lightning have lost eight of their last 10 games. Cooper for the third period of the meeting with Buffalo (3:5) put three leaders in reserve – Kucherov, Brayden Point, Steven Stamkos.

— John Cooper is not an easy coach. In terms of youth, the coach is “suffocating”. Won’t Nikita Kucherov be offended by him for being in reserve? Or will this situation make him even stronger?

– You are right to say that everything will depend on the coach. And rigidity is not important here. The same Nikita Kucherov worked with me when I was a child. And how I “suffocated” all the guys and him too to the maximum!

But a good trainer must “choke”! That is to say, to ask at every moment, to teach something. But players need to understand why they are “strangled”. The problem with children’s coaches is that they start to ask a lot of juniors, but at the same time they lose psychological contact with them.

I think Cooper just kept that contact with the executives. And they understand why they are “strangled”. If it’s for business, then it’s fine. And if Cooper starts adapting to it, it will be even worse. The team will crumble even more.

You have to be able to find that common ground in education to get results. You have to talk with the players, find a common language. Plus, Kucherov and Cooper have been working for so many years, starting with the AHL Farm Club.

It seems that John Cooper did not play hockey, but he managed to become a top coach. And here, I think, can correct the situation. And it depends on Cooper if Tampa can still stay afloat. How can he pull it all off.

I want to call Nikita here, talk to her. We corresponded with him after the All-Star Game, then Kucherov wrote that the team was not ready after the break. They just lost to Florida with a score of 1:7. After that, there were three wins in four matches. And now they have sunk a lot.

Stamkos is Tampa’s all-time leading scorer over the past four seasons (115+156=271 points), Point is second (115+128=243) and Kucherov is third (81+61=242), and he missed the entire championship due to injury. In the playoffs over the past four seasons, Kucherov is the league’s top scorer, while Point is third (30+31=61) and Stamkos isn’t that far off (20+18=38), although he was tormented by wounds.

Tampa has made three playoff finals in the previous three seasons. They have won the Stanley Cup twice (2020, 2021) and last year they lost in the deciding series to Colorado (2022).