For the third time in post-war history, the Hungarians played at the elite level of the Hockey World Cup and were closer than ever to retention, but it didn’t work out again. Not even star coach Kevin Constantine, who worked in the NHL for years and has many stories with Jaromír Jágr, saved them.
He shone the most in 1994, when he was among the finalists for the Jack Adams Award for the best coach in the NHL, for taking impoverished San Jose to the playoffs right after his arrival.
In the fall of 1997, another hard shift awaited him. As Pittsburgh’s new head coach, he was supposed to coach young league superstar Jagra.
“A wonderful player, I could tell you about him endlessly. He is the most talented hockey player I have ever worked with, and I had Kovaljov, Makarov and Larionov under me,” Constantine told the Hungarian newspaper Nemzeti Sport during the season.
At the same time, after so many years, he had no problem admitting that he often fought with Jágr: “It was very difficult for him to train. He was a God-level individualist who wanted to solve everything by himself, because he had all the necessary tools for that. He was not always interested in what was going on around him the ice was going on, and he was only willing to start with players with the same attacking mentality. We argued a lot.”
The first dispute occurred right at the first open training session. Constantine was asked by reporters if Jagr would train with a helmet, and he said of course he would. “Why wouldn’t he wear it?” he thought.
He had no idea that things worked differently in Pittsburgh than in San Jose, and that Jagr routinely flew around the ice without a helmet outside of games.
When he saw him like this at the beginning of training, he decided to talk to the Czech winger right away. Also to save face in front of journalists.
“I started moving towards him. Me, a former goalie with ordinary skates, to the best hockey player in the world. Once I added, so did he, so twenty players watched as the new coach chased his most important player around the ice. We ended up doing about six laps , before I stopped enjoying it,” Constantine recounted.
After all, he caught Jágr and explained to him that, according to the rules, he should train with a helmet and in full equipment. But he heard a disapproving response: “Those are your rules, not ours, not until we sign them.”
It turned out that the famous 68-year-old started training with a helmet only after signing a special contract.
The American coach lasted two and a half years in Pittsburgh, then got fired. “It’s easy to imagine that it was Jágr who kicked me out thanks to his huge influence, but our story together later had a nice ending,” Constantine began another story.
In January 2002, about two years after being fired, he got the head coaching job at New Jersey. When Jagr, who has since transferred to Washington, visited there as an opponent, he came to greet his former coach straight to the office after the game.
“A normal mortal wouldn’t be able to just walk in on me, because you have to go through thorough security checks, but if anyone could walk in wherever he wanted, it was Jagr,” commented Constantine.
“Even though we were never the best of friends, I was pleased to see him, so I got up to shake his hand,” he continued. “But instead of greeting me, this hundred and twenty-kilogram mountain of muscles hugged me and held me in such a way that I wasn’t even standing with my feet on the ground anymore. It took five seconds, but it felt like an hour.”
“Then he tells me, ‘You were my best coach.’ To that I replied: ‘Don’t be crazy, Jaromir, we both know it’s not true.’ But he insisted: ‘No, no, seriously, nobody made me play as much as you.’ Of course I used him a lot, he was an extremely smart and goal-oriented guy,” Constantine added.
In the second season under the strict American, Jagr achieved 24:18 icetime, his highest in his overseas career. Since 1997, when the NHL began measuring players’ time on the ice, only Paul Kariya (25:16) and Joe Sakic (24:31) have reached a higher value among forwards, coincidentally in the same year.
Constantine’s less than a year’s stop in New Jersey was the last in the NHL.
After stints in the Canadian junior and farm AHL, he headed to the world in 2010. Through France, Switzerland, South Korea and Poland, he reached Hungary, where he joined the Székesfehérvár national team this season.
At the World Championships in Tampere and Riga, he almost led it to stay in the elite group, only a raid defeat in the last match against Austria decided the failure.
2023-05-24 07:45:16
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