Rick Tocchet was a coach, confidant and friend to Phil Kessel for much of the past two seasons.
Tuesday night, he will be an opponent.
Tocchet, who left his job as a Penguins assistant this past offseason to take over as head coach in Arizona, will return to town Tuesday when the Coyotes visit PPG Paints Arena. While most players on the team obviously had a relationship with Tocchet, he and Kessel were especially close.
“He’s a good guy, we’re buddies,” Kessel said. “We get along well. I think we like the same kind of things and, obviously, when he was here, we had a good relationship.”
That relationship was on center stage last season in the Stanley Cup final, when cameras caught Kessel and Tocchet having a long chat before Game 4 in Nashville, Tenn. Kessel said Tocchet gave him a lot of advice over their time together, though he declined to get specific.
“Rick is a great guy and we got along great here,” he said. “I’ve got nothing but great things to say about him.”
Kessel said he probably won’t go out to dinner or anything with Tocchet while he’s in town, but he is looking forward to saying hello. He said he was sad to see Tocchet leave this offseason but understood he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take over an NHL team.
“It’s cool for him,” Kessel said. “Obviously, he’s a great guy, great coach. I was real happy that he got a head job. Obviously their season hasn’t started off the way they wanted to, but they’re young and they’re going to improve.”
The Penguins will hope they don’t show too much improvement Tuesday night. They’re looking to bounce back from a 1-3-1 road trip, and Kessel, specifically, is trying to break a season-long five-game goal-less drought.
“Maybe that’s just what we needed, to have Tocc come back,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan joked. “He’s certainly a guy that we miss. He’s a great coach, he’s good person.”
Making progress?
Sullivan was confident after practice Monday that, despite ending the road trip with an overtime loss in Calgary and a loss in Vancouver, he liked the direction the Penguins were trending, particularly when it came to their offensive game.
They still have not scored more than one 5-on-5 goal in a game since Oct. 17, but they put up 37 even-strength shots Thursday night in Calgary and 31 Saturday against the Canucks.
“The last three games that we’ve played, there’s a lot to like about our overall team game,” Sullivan said. “We’ve generated a lot of scoring chances, especially 5-on-5, which is something that has been sporadic this first part of the season. We do think we’re making progress as far as playing the game the right way.”
‘It’s gone’
Ian Cole’s bright red beard could breathe a little bit easily at practice Monday. He finally ditched the full face shield he had been wearing since blocking a puck with his teeth Oct. 7 against Nashville. Cole wore the shield for 10 games but was happy to get it off.
“It’s gone,” he said. “I can’t say that I’m sad to see it go. It’s something that you deal with and you make work just because you have to, but it’s something that you take off and realize how much easier it is to see.”
Sam Werner: swerner@post-gazette.com and Twitter @SWernerPG.
First Published: November 6, 2017, 10:41 p.m.