FootyChatter.com

NHL The Athletic went behind the scenes with the Spirit to get an inside look at their approach under GM Dave Drinkill and head coach Chris Lazary. Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos courtesy of the Saginaw Spirit SAGINAW, Mich. — As Saginaw Spirit general manager Dave Drinkill pulls out of the alleyway behind the Dow Event Centre, he passes a mural on the arena’s parking garage celebrating his team’s 2024 Memorial Cup victory. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat of his Chevrolet Silverado on a recent Friday game day, and he’s defending the way he and his head coach, Chris Lazary, build and run their team. Advertisement Over three games in three days earlier this season, The Athletic went behind the scenes with the Spirit to get an inside look at what that looks like, from video sessions to pregame speeches, intermission chats and postgame celebrations. Drinkill and Lazary are the second-longest tenured GM-coach tandem in the OHL. Drinkill is in his 20th year in the league and 11th as Saginaw’s GM. He’s a “handshake farm boy” from rural Elmvale, Ontario, who started out throwing T-shirts at Sudbury Wolves games before rising through the ranks with the Barrie Colts to assistant GM and eventually landing the Saginaw job. Lazary is in his ninth year as one of his coaches and seventh as the head coach. Together, they’ve developed top NHL draft picks such as Michael Misa, Cole Perfetti, Pavel Mintyukov and Zayne Parekh, won every on- and off-ice award there is to win, and put together winning teams. They’ve missed the playoffs just once — the pandemic season, when Perfetti unexpectedly played in the AHL under its one-off 19-year-old exemption, and when Drinkill would have to yell “the faxes are coming in! ” before every road trip to Canada as one-by-one his players’ COVID test results would spit out, telling them just how short-benched they’d be. He thinks they could’ve won the OHL championship in 2020, when COVID hit, and they had a 41-16-5 record with the first age group he and Lazary built around together. The second team they built together was the only one to take games off the London Knights in the 2024 OHL playoffs, beating them twice in the Western Conference final and a third time when it mattered most in the Memorial Cup final. And what they’ve accomplished in Saginaw, they’ve done in their own way. It all starts with a focus on puck possession. Drinkill gravitates away from north-south players who “just shoot pucks from anywhere. ” Those players, he acknowledges, become high picks. “We’re just not built that way, ” he said. He likes size, but only if it can play and believes bigger players take longer to develop, preferring to trade for them once he knows which ones panned out. Advertisement He scouts for game-breakers who are comfortable with the puck on their stick and could lead his team in scoring. “We don’t go by the consensus of ‘This guy played for the Marlies, and he’s a 6-3 winger who put up 40 goals. ’ Well, how did he put up the goals? Did he generate them by himself? ” he said. He uses the Montreal Canadiens as a team that, like the Spirit, has embraced manipulation as a big part of its game. This summer, he recruited 5-foot-11, 2027 NHL Draft-eligible defenseman Levi Harper. Where some teams want just one Harper for their power-play role, he and Lazary wish they could have one on every pair and want offense from all six of their D. The year they drafted Parekh, OHL scouts were scared by him. The Spirit loved him. “They said, ‘Oh, but he can’t do that at the next level? ’ and I said, ‘Why not? ’ And NHL teams said the same thing: ‘He can’t do what he’s doing. ’ And it’s like ‘Why can’t he? ’” Drinkill said. He believes players are over-scouted in minor and junior hockey, and doesn’t fuss over a bad game or groupthink around a player’s perceived flaws. They like late birthdays because they get to work with them for three years pre-draft instead of two, and they look for the same traits in the 15th round as the first. This year, they drafted late-birthday forward Ryan Hanrahan, one of the only 15-year-olds to start the season in the OHL, with the 13th pick after he had just 10 points in 23 AAA games, betting on the development runway of a player who’d gone from a 5-foot-4 skill player to 6-foot-1 in a blink. “Some GMs are scared away from trying things, ” he said. “I’m not a safe GM. I’m never like ‘Oh, this guy’s going to play. ’ They should all f—ing play. They’re high picks in the OHL. I’ve had NHL scouts tell me about a second-round pick ‘Oh, but he’s a safe player, he projects as a third-liner. ’ You’re looking for a third-liner in the second round? Advertisement “Laz and I, we build differently, ” Drinkill said. “We just do. ” Drinkill calls Lazary “elite at presenting. ” That’s when he’s in his element. Kyle Makaric, the team’s newest assistant coach, got the job after tracking down Lazary at a coach’s conference in Ann Arbor, Mich. He’d seen him present there two years ago and told himself if he saw him again, he’d go talk to him. Before Saginaw, he was an assistant in Tier 2 with the Ottawa Jr. Senators, and his owner had told him if he ever wanted to check out some OHL games, he’d get him tickets. The only time he took him up on it was when the Spirit visited because he felt they played a modern, progressive style. Lazary treats the Spirit’s theater like he’s a teacher at the front of a classroom, constantly shooting questions to his players. When he asks them, “Who are we bumping here? ” or “If F1 comes down ice here, what are we doing? ” or “Who’s calling that? ” or “What are the wingers doing here? ” or “Who’s responsibility is that? ” they have the answers. “The winger. ” “Speed. ” “The two drop guys. ” “Owning the slot. ” “Low guy. ” When he talks about the offensive zone, he talks a lot about swinging, slipping, rolling, movement, patterns and “getting to your landmarks. ” When he talks about the defensive zone, he talks the players through their structure for two scenarios — low-puck and high-puck — and uses terms like “sting, ” “quick to four, ” “handoff, ” “reset” and “fold. ” When his players drew up a new power play look called The Miro earlier this year, he told them he thought it was “f—ing sick” and encouraged them to try it again during a session. “It’s off-puck movement, ” he told them. “At the end of the day, they were a little confused, and we did a great job slipping in and getting that look. ” Lazary likes to watch the team-made documentaries that the Carolina Hurricanes, Pittsburgh Penguins and others do so that he can cut and show his players when NHL coaches are talking about the same things he is. Advertisement Asked about the concepts of movement he teaches, he laughs about how even Perfetti, the smartest player he’s ever coached, squinted through his early Spirit video sessions. “We want guys to understand interchangeable parts and to get a player to develop his brain that way, sometimes there’s mistakes. But when it takes hold, that’s good development for them, whether they play that way in the NHL or not, because they understand the game more, ” he said. “I think we have a responsibility to develop players outside of winning, so to get them to have this visual, 360 degree of the ice, helps players when they leave here. We’re big believers in not putting guys into ‘Well, you’re only going to do or be this. ’ You’re just stunting growth. Our job is to try to get them to be more. ” With enough repetition, and usually after slow starts for his teams, he says the players figure it out, and the chaos that some outsiders see is actually “just patterns. ” “I think you can move a little more in the NHL and then you watch teams that do it a little and it works (he says Florida will slide guys through coverage, and that there’s a method to Carolina’s shoot-from-everywhere madness), ” he said. “I say it all the time when guys ask about our offense: ‘It’s just basketball. ’ When one guy moves the ball, what happens? Another guy fills a space, and then all of a sudden someone on the interior has drawn someone from the three-point line, and there’s an open shot. It’s the same concept. When our guys come through coverage, it’s hard to cover because the other guys are thinking, ‘Do I go, or do I not go? ’ It’s just a little bit of confusion — enough to find a play. ” A lot of their offensive zone play is developed through three small area games they practice over and over, spray painting the ice to show the players the areas they always need filled and teaching them “it’s all about reading off of the guy that you passed it to. ” To illustrate it from his office, he takes a marker from his desk and maps out one of the drills. “Guys are always like ‘Yeah, but you give up chances back the other way. ’ And I’m like ‘Yeah, well I watch teams that don’t threaten that give up just as many chances the other way. Why not try to get a little more creative? ’” he said. “As long as two of your guys are centered around the puck then what’s the problem? If it’s two D defending a rush, we’re good defensively, but if it’s a forward and a D, we’re bad defensively? And now everybody forward angles when they skate, so we want our D to forward angle, and you think a forward can’t forward angle? ” Advertisement This season, after losing their top five scorers from a year ago (Misa and Parekh to the NHL, Igor Chernyshov to the AHL, Kristian Epperson to the NCAA and 21-year-old Calem Mangone), the Spirit are in a novel spot for Drinkill and Lazary. Despite a record under . 500, though, their conviction in what they’re doing is unwavering. That conviction isn’t just in the way they play, either. When prospects and their families visit Saginaw, Lazary will often take them to Heritage High School and Saginaw Valley State University. On those trips, he’ll explain to them why, as some teams move to online schooling for their players so that they can be on the ice in the mornings, his must attend school from 8 a. m. to 12 p. m. , arguing it’s better for them to be in a classroom, attending school events, and, yes, having girlfriends, than to always be at the rink. For the high school graduates, he’ll tell them that they’ll have to take at least one class at SVSU. And their players are all-in with them. At the end of a perfect 3-0-0 three-in-three, potential 2026 first-rounder and Saginaw newcomer Nikita Klepov said what his teammates — from Harper to top 2027 prospect Dima Zhilkin — had all weekend: How much he likes playing for Lazary and Drinkill. Lazary, he said, is the first coach he has ever had use some of the concepts he does. “Laz coaches a very unique style of game, ” he said. “It’s very different with all of the motion, and I love playing in it. ” But the passion players have for playing with Lazary and Drinkill hasn’t been reciprocated by the NHL yet. On the wall inside their player lounge are the names of Spirit NHL alumni. They’ll bring a painter in the morning after a debut so that the players can see the names go up. Misa’s is the latest. When The Athletic first arrived, Drinkill paused where Washington Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery’s name is on it (Carbery was the Spirit’s head coach for a year when Lazary was an assistant) and said, “Laz and I want to get our name up there someday. ” Advertisement After interviewing for a couple of AHL head coaching jobs, though, Lazary says he has been told, “unreal interview, but we’re going to go a different direction. ” Drinkill doesn’t know why his head coach is still his head coach. “I’m shocked that nobody has given him a long look here. He wins, guys love him, he’s the hardest-working guy I’ve ever been around — like he’s at the rink every day at 5: 30. He’s a good teacher, ” Drinkill said. “I think guys are scared because he’s outside the norm a little bit. I worry that all of a sudden, 15 years from now, the NHL is going to be how Laz thinks, and I just hope it doesn’t get to the point where now Laz is too old. ” And Lazary doesn’t know what else he can do. “Team success has been great. Player development has been great. And the phone never rings. I’m at the point where I’m like ‘Am I the next Brian Kilrea or Dale Hunter? ’” Lazary said. “I look at our analytics, and they’re like ‘You don’t defend, ’ and I’m like ‘Last year we spent the least amount of time in our D-zone and gave up the second-least high-danger slot shots. ’ So we don’t defend, but we have the best defensive numbers in the league, and our offensive numbers are always off the charts? ” At 42, Drinkill acknowledged he’s not young anymore, either. He has had opportunities to scout in the big leagues, but to leave Saginaw, he said, he’d have to either get fired or not renewed, or get offered an assistant GM role. “I can’t just write reports, and if they draft my guys, they draft them, and if they don’t, they don’t, ” he said. “At least not right now in my life. And maybe it won’t happen, but we have a good thing here, and I don’t want to just leave for the sake of leaving. We believe in what we’re doing. Guys are getting drafted high here and going on to pro careers. ” Advertisement These days, Lazary’s doing his best to take advice from longtime mentor Jeff Twohey and just “Do a great job where you’re at. ” Such is the life of a junior hockey coach, maybe especially one that’s different. “This is what I do, ” Lazary said. “I coach here. My family loves it here. I love working with Drinks. We’ve had some good success. My kids were born here. It’s OK to be here. ” Scott Wheeler covers the NHL draft and prospects nationally for The Athletic. Scott has written for the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Sun, the National Post, and several other outlets in the past. He's also the author of ‘On The Clock: Behind the Scenes with the Toronto Maple Leafs at the NHL Draft’. Follow Scott on Twitter @scottcwheeler