"Hockey Was My Education, and I Had to Make the Most of It"

Washington Capitals assistant coach Mitch Love on the journey from junior to the NHL, the evolution of the modern player, managing an NHL bench, and stick-on-puck defending

Mitch Love just completed his first season as an assistant coach running the defense for the Washington Capitals.  After injury forced the end of his playing career, he began his coaching career as an assistant for the WHL’s Everett Silvertips, where he had played in junior.  He progressed on to serve as head coach of the Saskatoon Blades, before spending two seasons coaching Calgary’s AHL team (the first as the Stockton Heat, then the second as the Calgary Wranglers), before joining Spencer Carbery’s staff in Washington.  This interview was made possible by the folks at The Coaches Site, and Love will give a presentation at TCS Live in Ann Arbor this weekend.

In five full seasons of major junior, Mitch Love fought 89 times.  This was not the Western Hockey League of Connor Bedard; instead, it belonged to Shea Weber and Ryan Getzlaf.  Love, like so many young men of his generation, did what he had to.  The rough stuff “was what I had to do to survive and play any sort of competitive hockey in junior and the American League as a player,” he explains over the phone last week.  At forty, he remains a young coach, his playing days not so far removed, yet his exploits on the ice—some twenty years ago—were the stuff of campfire stories to the WHL players he came up coaching.

“If you go to junior hockey, there's some leagues that don't even partake in any of that stuff anymore,” says Love. “So the game has just changed. It's really driven on speed and skill. There's still a little bit of pugilist stuff in it and competitiveness, but the game’s just changed so much.  Guys will sit around the training room or sitting around the players lounge and guys will ask me questions about what it was like twenty years ago, fighting forty times a season in junior hockey. They're more interested in the stories and just in the wows and awes of ‘Man, that was the game twenty years ago.’  

“I look as a coach now, having played that role…as just how competitive are you on a loose puck battle? How competitive are you to defend your net front? How competitive are you to get that puck back and give it to your forwards like that? That's how I looked at the game. I think that's the game the way it's trended and, and you look at Florida, they're competitive, they have good sticks, they're heavy, and they don't give up on plays. That's the game, and that's where it's gone.”

That competitiveness manifests in one of the central tenets of his coaching philosophy (on which he will speak Thursday afternoon at TCS Live): stick-on-puck defending.  It’s a lesson Love is eager to share because of its universality.  

“It’s just something that I grasped when I really got into coaching early on in my career, and the different levels I've been at— the Western League, the American League, and now the NHL—you really start to see the importance of having a good stick,” Love offers.  “When you're playing against the best of the best in the world each and every night, if you don't have good stick detail in terms of killing plays or getting in passing lanes, you're gonna be a minus hockey player…I felt like based on the crowd, the audience—you're gonna have youth hockey coaches, you have junior coaches, college coaches, and pro coaches I'm sure—I felt like it was something that was relevant to everybody and can be taught at a young age but also reiterated at these East Coast League level, American League, NHL, whatever.”

At times, the lesson can appear so simple as to be redundant, and yet, at every level of hockey, it distinguishes effective defenders from careless ones.  “There's not as many players on your active roster each and every day that wanna finish checks,” Love explains. “For me, this is another way to check the game, another way to be a good defensive player, without any sort of body contact if that's not something you're interested in as a player.  And then the benefit of it is just keeping a puck in an area, waiting for a buddy to come help you get the puck back to create offense.  And at the end of the day, that's what these guys want to do…So I think it's an easy sell to a player of just how important a good stick is, especially at the NHL level and it starts in junior.  Guys look at you like you got three heads because they're like, ‘Well, what do you mean my stick’s not in a good spot?’ Well, that puck went right through ya to the guy at the back door and then to the back of the net.  Now you’re -1. That's how important that stick is.”

In this his first season in the NHL, Love was warned to beware the schedule’s grind but, as a veteran of the less luxurious travel accommodations of junior and the minors, had to experience it for himself to believe it.  “In my conversations with individuals that were at the National Hockey League level, staffing-wise, [the warning] was be prepared for the schedule,” he recalls. “The travel, games every other day, the back-to-backs.  From afar, from the American League or junior hockey where I came from you're like, ‘Yeah, okay, sure. Yeah, we ride buses in the Western Hockey League, we fly commercial in the American Hockey League, yeah. How bad is it?’ But it's a real thing. Your preparation for the players, for your staff, for the meeting the next day if you play the night before—the quick turnaround is very, very key. So you’ve got to be very diligent with your time and have great time management and be prepared that way. So that was a bit of an adjustment.”

On the ice, Love had to acclimate to the NHL’s quality, learning how to run his own bench as to maximize the usage of his best players.  “Typically for me—and I can be candid about it…let's say we're playing the Tampa Bay Lightning,” he explains.  “I'll watch two or three of their previous games, to see how John Cooper utilizes his bench.  Who are the three forwards coming out after a power play for them? Who's the three forwards coming out after penalty kill for them? So it gives me a bit of an idea as a coach working with defensemen when can I utilize and deploy my top pair defensemen coming out of a penalty kill, because you always kind of come back with Kucherov. 

“It's a lot of that kind of stuff, so you get a bit of an idea.  It's not scripted. It's not going to be like that every time.  You got to stay on your toes. I'm very upfront and honest with our defenseman on a game-to-game basis on what matchups I'm looking for potentially. So the guys kind of know the rotation or what's coming.  As a coach, you try to utilize the TV time outs to your advantage to maximize maybe a John Carlson in a situation where he's gonna play 45 seconds to a minute, but I know the next whistle is going to be TV time out and O zone face-off, and John's probably going back out. So there's a lot of that that goes into it. Like I said earlier, it was a bit of a learning lesson for me as a coach and how to really utilize our top players and find the right matchups each and every night.”

Meanwhile, Love explains that of course you can’t coach a junior player and an NHLer the exact same way, but at the core, the key to doing either well is understanding the evolving nature of the player-coach relationship.  

“I think as a coach, your job is to find ways to get to your players and get the most out of them, and that's different for each guy based on their personality or their skillset,” contends Love.  “And we talk about confidence and consistency all the time with young athletes, so it's our job as coaches is to instill confidence in their game by working with the athlete and showing them what you're looking for as a coach, and it's really a partnership between the coach and the player now.  I think twenty years ago when I was playing junior hockey, it was, ‘this is what you do. If you don't do it, you don't play.’ Those days are over now. And so I think that was a big thing. And then finding consistency out of all that.  Part of being a good NHL player is being the best of yourself each and every day. And I think that's a big thing that separates guys from the American Hockey League level to the NHL and being regulars or guys that are just up and down is consistency and understanding your roles and responsibilities as a player.”

“I think it's our job as coaches to stay up with the times of the athlete and the player and what's motivating them,” he continues.  “How can you get through to them to do what you're looking for as a coach? So it's really our job to kind of follow suit of the players and stay current with the times of today's athlete and today's game.  At the end of the day, these guys are smart. These hockey players are smart,and  they don't miss a beat..They got information at their fingertips each and every day. They don't miss a beat on anything. You got to be sharp as a coach.  You got to be ready. You got to be ready to answer hard questions from a player. So if you're not current with that, and your communication skills are maybe a little lackluster, I'm sure the players sniff that out. And so it's really important that you're confident in yourself and really staying up with the times.”

For Love’s Capitals, the 2023-24 season was nothing if not distinctive.  Infamously, Washington finished the season with a -37 goal differential yet qualified for the playoffs, snatching the final spot in a chaotic Eastern Conference wild card race.

“It was a funny year,” reflects Love. “We as a staff would sit and talk about that, and I think for us, our focus was more or less was ‘Where are we at today? What do we need to work on today?’ Versus really spending any time overall trying to get ourselves out of a goal differential hole. We struggled to score hockey goals. We saw it early on.  There was a bit of a trend upwards probably January, February, March. That probably propelled us to a situation you know, where we got into the playoffs. Our powerplay started to score that second half of the year and was really good for us. 

“But we didn't get caught up on it,” he continues. “We just we knew that we were in the mix. We're in the fight. We kind of flipped.  We were in; we were out.  We were in.  We're hanging around, hanging around, finding ways to get points. The bizarreness of it all was, obviously you know, Philadelphia pulling their goalie, and TJ Oshie scoring the empty netter to get us in the playoffs.  That's probably something you won't ever see again. That was bizarre to get in the playoffs that way, so it was a fun year. We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us as a staff and a team.  We want to make sure if we're gonna be a playoff team again at some point here, we probably can't be at minus differentials and get into the playoffs because that's a rarity in the NHL.”

In taking the Capitals assistant job, Love joined the staff of Spencer Carbery, a 42-year-old first time NHL head coach whom Love did not even know especially well.  “I had some conversations [with him] when he was in the East Coast Hockey League with South Carolina when I was in Everrett in the Western League,” Love says. “He called me on free agent players that were maxing out on their junior careers, and then I met him at a Hockey Canada coaching seminar probably six, seven years ago, and that was it.  And then we just connected, went through the process, and I'm really happy to be on his staff and really enjoy the DC area.

Up close, Carbery’s leadership impressed.  “He's very detailed, he's very organized, he's got a plan, he works extremely hard, and that's kind of how we played,” assesses Love.  “We had detail.  We were a better defensive team than the Caps were a year ago. Our guys did a good job of making adjustments that were brought in by Spencer and our staff. And I think our guys played off his energy. He's a passionate guy. He's got good energy, good jam in the locker room, and you can see motivates players well, and you need that.  In a long hockey season, you need that.  Things aren't gonna go well.  You need some motivation. You need some spark. He did a good job of finding that balance and having a good feel of our group.”  The result was an outcome few expected, even if the path to that destination was an unlikely one.

When Love began his coaching career in Everett, he couldn’t help but question just how far his future might stretch in hockey, and the memory of those doubts makes life in the NHL all the sweeter.

“I think it’s been fourteen years since I started coaching,” says Love.  “You go junior hockey, and I spent seven years in Everett as an assistant. I think I worked for four different head coaches in those seven years.  You start to doubt like Hey, am I gonna get a chance? Or am I gonna be a head coach or I want to be a head coach. I've always felt like I had the personality and the leadership qualities to be a head coach, but you never know. And then Saskatoon gave me an opportunity and spent let's call it three years, one of those being a COVID year, so basically two and a half. They gave me an opportunity to be a head coach and tried to make the most of it. We had good teams.  We were competitive. And then Calgary gave me an opportunity to be in the American League, and then when I got to Calgary was part of their organization..You don't know how long you're going to be there or what you're going to what your path is going to be. When I got to the American League, I was like, ‘Okay, well, this is what I do. This is a living now.  This is a major living for me.’ I have to travel around.  I’m gonna have to leave my family, and I got to Stockton and got to Calgary and we had two good hockey seasons, so maybe there's a chance to be in the NHL one day.

“I never really chased it like that. I just kind of went to work and tried to make sure the players were competitive and we had good teams.  But it's such a pleasure being in the National Hockey League. It's an honor and privilege each and every day.  You often hear guys say there's never a bad day in the NHL, and that's true. There's tough times.  You lose three or four in a row, and it's tough to go to work. But at the end of the day, you’re in a place that you wish you were as a kid, so it's a pleasure to be in the league for sure now, after all the years of riding buses and being with guys, but the players I've coached all the way for fourteen years were really the reason I got an opportunity to be in the NHL.”

When asked whether those doubts ever led him to seriously consider a career outside of hockey, particularly in those early days in Everett, Love replies, “Not really, No.  The team hired different head coaches, and I was still on the staff, and I tried every day to work well with the new coach.  But I don't think it ever crossed my mind ‘I don't want to do this anymore.’  I was in a really good situation in Everett where I played junior there.  I had a young family, so it was home, and so it was nice to be there, and I was fortunate to stay through different coaching changes on staffs to stay there. It was all I knew.  I had to retire at twenty-six because of a hip issue.  All I knew was being around the game.  I didn’t have any secondary education, college degree.  Hockey was my education, and I had to make the most of it. I'm sure glad I did.”

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