BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings
SPRINGFIELD, MA – John Anderson’s road to the AHL Hall-of-Fame is a true hockey journey. Beginning with his captaincy during his junior days with the first edition of the Toronto Marlies of the OHA (now OHL). He was a first-round pick and spent eight years with the Maple Leafs. His journey continued for a brief one year stay with the Quebec Nordiques, who had drafted him during their WHA days. Anderson then had a strong four-year run with the Hartford Whalers. While in the Connecticut capital, Anderson would score the game-winning goal that gave the Whalers their one and their only division title.
After leaving the Whalers, Anderson headed for Europe, which didn’t make me him happy.
“I really hated it. I wanted to come back. The following summer I had worked as hard as I could, but I got no tryouts to any training camps and I have to admit, I was angry with the game at the point. Then, I got a call from an old friend, Gabby (Bruce Boudreau) to come to Ft. Wayne. He said, ‘Play with me. We’ll have some fun again.’ I asked him, ‘I’m not much on geography where is Ft. Wayne?’”
After a season with the Ft. Wayne Komets (IHL) and listening to Boudreau, it was his best hockey decision.
“It was a great piece of advice that I listened to. I was worried about riding the bus everywhere and the whole nine yards. It was the best thing I ever did. It was such a close-knit group. Everybody checked their egos at the door. I appreciated those guys giving me back the love of the game. It was a very special group.”
Anderson would then begin to make his AHL mark with the New Haven Nighthawks as a Player/Assistant Coach a year later.
“I really have to thank the New Haven Nighthawks. They made an old hockey player feel good and resurrected. It could have been over for my career. That was a very good group of players we had that year. It made me, an old player, feel a bit young again.”
Anderson captured the Les Cunningham AHL MVP Trophy that season playing with a team that was half a crew of refugees from the Quebec Nordiques. The team they assembled was one of the last two Independent AHL teams. The line he was a part of, was one of the most fearsome in league history.
Anderson played on the left wing. Stan Drulia manned the right wing while Paul Willett was the center. The group compiled 277 points in 1991-92. Drulia had 102 of those points. He was one of only two players in Nighthawk history to top the century mark in total points. Willett had 80 points. Anderson had 41 goals and a team-leading 54 assists (95 points) and a plus-42, as the trio blitzed goalies in what was then, just a 15-team AHL. Putting that in perspective, it’s less than half of today’s what today’s AHL landscape encompasses.
Interestingly though, the line almost never happened.
“I was injured late in the year in Ft. Wayne and didn’t play in the playoffs, I had a bad charley-horse. In fact, they thought it was broken. It actually laid down extra calcium (similar to Cam Neely’s career-ending injury). It never really healed in the summer, I barely trained, so I walked into camp, literally walked in, as a free agent. The only other person who had a worse camp than me was Stan. I saw him play one game the season before, you noticed him.
“Dougie Carpenter (the team’s head coach) wasn’t going to sign him and he had like 140 points the year before (with Knoxville ECHL). I said he had something special and I really lobbied Carpenter to sign him. Drulia took a pay cut to play in New Haven. He was being offered $1,500 a week to play in the East Coast League that year.
“Then there was a shooting in the mall (Chapel Square Mall) around the corner from the arena (New Haven Coliseum) during camp. His wife was like, ‘What are we doing here?” said Anderson.
The AHL minimum at the time was far below what it is today ($70K) and this was just before the first rise in salaries that started with the 1994 NHL work stoppage.
Anderson mentored many of his teammates. One of those he taught, Trevor Stienburg, has for the past 17 years, been a head coach with the St. Mary’s University Huskies (AUAA) in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Stienburg was one of the ten players on that Nighthawk roster who were Quebec Nordiques prospects assigned to the team. Another ten were an assortment of AHL free agents of which Anderson was one.
“John was such a good guy and a great teammate. He is so worthy of the honor,” Stienburg said in a phone interview from Halifax.
“John’s style at that time might not fit the way hockey is structured today, but it was highly effective back then.
“John played hockey like some people play basketball. He would set picks for others. He was the dean of subtle obstruction. When I would have the puck in the offensive zone, he would skate to me trying not to get open, and then at the last minute he would shake his coverage with his pick and he was open for the pass or created an open lane for you to shoot. He would always say, ‘Act like an object'”
The seeds for the second half of Anderson’s AHL career as a head coach were planted in New Haven.
“John was the MVP of the league in so many ways. He always took the time to teach guys. He was maybe one of the very first player-assistant coaches in the AHL. He and Doug (head coach Doug Carpenter) were a good team and he gave him a lot of opportunity.
“I would be a veteran at the point, and to be honest I wanted to be in Halifax. So, when I went to New Haven with that group, it felt like a demotion, because it was. To be honest, I was down emotionally. As we grew as a group, it got better each day and John was a big part of that. He was open. If you didn’t understand something, he would say, ‘Come over here, I’ll show you.’ He made me receptive to learning new things. That really helped me at that point in my career and down the line.
“As my skating started to suffer late in my career, I always remember what John taught me and others in New Haven. I teach that to my players now just, in a bit more of a modified approach.”
Anderson was an important part of the fabric for that edition of the Nighthawks. The Nordiques didn’t think they were prospects to be with the Halifax Citadels, the primary farm team for the Quebec.
“He was the centerpiece of the team; a natural born leader, and he has accomplished a lot in this game. He is a Hall-of-Famer in my book,” said Stienburg.
For Anderson and that team they started off quite poorly at 3-14, but his troublesome charley-horse finally began to heal and the trio started to click and collect points. They turned their record around with an inverted 14-3 run.
“Stiener was one of funniest teammates I ever had, and he and all the guys made me feel so welcomed. He was the reason we turned it around had such a good year. We had so many good players in that group. Scotty Arniel, Brian Dobbin, and Lou Francheschetti were on the other line. Once, I got healthy, and guys got to know each other, we got better as the season went along.
“All of the guys on that team got an NHL contract to sign except me,” Anderson said with his huge broad smile and a laugh.
It was in New Haven that Anderson caught the bug for coaching which would be the other half of his sterling AHL career with the Chicago Wolves.
“Doug never called me his assistant coach, he called me his little helper. We went up to Adirondack together to watch a pre-season game there to see if we might be able to pick up a couple players for us. We were up in Lake George. It was a beautiful fall day and Doug says, ‘Do you want to sit in the restaurant?’ I said, ‘No, let’s go on the tour boat.’ Doug was kind of a staunch guy, I was a bit (adventurous), but we’re symbiotic as coaches together. That year he lost his mother which was very hard for him, but he was a great coach because he let me do my thing.”
He remembers his last AHL game in Springfield as a player vividly.
“We sit down after the Star Spangled Banner. I see guys at the end of the bench to the right are laughing. I look left the guys are laughing and our head coach, Dougie Carpenter, is behind me. He’s laughing, and so I Iook at Stan Drulia and said, ‘What the heck is so funny?’ He said, ‘Look behind you.
“A guy came down behind the bench with a huge sign the size of a bedsheet: ‘Anderson: Caution Microwave In Use.’,
“I wish he were here today because I have a new pacemaker and its microwave proof – Ha!”
Chicago is where Anderson made a tremendous mark with two of the three last IHL Turner Cups, and their first year in the AHL won the Calder Cup over Bridgeport in five games.
“We had all the ingredients. Kevin Cheveldayoff (the GM) has more rings than fingers, who might get one more in Winnipeg was great and he just let me coach. The owners, Don Levin, and Buddy Myers gave me all the tools I needed. And by tools I mean money.” Anderson said chuckling. The Wolves captured two titles in the AHL and the two in the IHL for an impressive seven-year run and add in the United Hockey League title he won in Quad Cit,y Anderson’s resume had the word winner stamped on it.”
The team also helped Anderson with their affiliation with the now-defunct Atlanta Thrashers where he eventually got his first NHL head coaching gig.
Teaching others came naturally because of his strong competitive desire.
“I really wanted to win that year. It was important to lead by example with such a diverse group that we had in New Haven. Being personable with players was a big thing. It doesn’t take much but finding out how a guy is doing. Bruce Boudreau and I have the same philosophy. What we always talked about was talking to every player, every day, because you don’t know what is going on. His kid might have been sick, or something else going on. It went a long way with players.”
After two more years playing with San Diego, he began his hockey coaching odyssey in the Southern Hockey League in 1995, a six-team reincarnation of the mid-‘70’s version that lasted all of one year. Anderson had a tale from his Winston-Salem Mammoths days that brought the house down.
“There was a lot to learn you had to do a lot yourself there wasn’t an assistant coach at the time. I even learned how to put up signs on the dasher boards. I learned a lot valuable things.
“I was at the dinner table with my (unofficial) assistant coach Victor Posa, and I get a call from Walt Podubny (Ranger from the 1980s), the head coach of the Daytona Beach team.
“We start discussing a trade. He wanted a guy we had on defense, and I wanted one of his offensive defenseman. We talked about 20 minutes and I ended it, ‘Hey Walt, We’re set. We have a deal? Yes, we do.
“Next morning, he calls me and says his owner won’t let him make the deal, so the deal is off. I said, ‘OK Walt if anything changes and you can call me.’
“We have a game that night. We’re playing great. We were down to four D as one player got sick before the game. So we’re ahead in the third period, and one of my guys punches a guy in the head, the defenseman I was going to trade. So he gets tossed and we’re down to three D and are shorthanded the rest of the game.
“So, my youngest, Spencer, was six at the time, and he hung up things in the locker room and he goes in there and the player is throwing a fit. He’s throwing everything, gloves, helmets, and shoulder pads.
“Spencer asks him, ‘What’s wrong, Travis (Hulse)?’
“Your father is gonna kill me if we lose this game. He’s going to be angry with me. It’s gonna be horrible.”
“My son gives him a Gatorade and says, ‘Don’t worry, Travis my Dad is going to trade you anyhow.’
“Note to future coaches never discuss work at the dinner table.”
Going to the AHL was always a place of last resort for hockey players in his day.
“Everybody says I don’t want to go the American League till you get there. I look back as a player and a person how necessary and vital it was to go there to grow and develop personally. I realize just how vitally important the AHL is and it made me a better coach and a better person in being honored today says everything for me.”
John Anderson has shown just how valuable the AHL is, and how valuable he has been to the modern era of the AHL as he proudly takes his place the Hall of Fame.
