Kraken Coach Search
First of all, Lane Lambert is a nifty little trivia question related to the 1983 NHL Draft. The Detroit Red Wings chose eventual Hockey Hall of Famer and their current general manager Steve Yzerman with the 4th-overall pick in the 1st round. With their second pick, the 4th of the 2nd-round, they took Lambert.
He went on to play 176 games for Detroit and a total of 283 regular season NHL games. As a feisty right-shot forward, Lambert helped the Adirondack Red Wings win a Calder Cup championship in 1986 and an International Hockey League Turner Cup with the Houston Aeros in 1999.
By the way, he’s not from Quebec, so the tendency to want to pronounce his name “Lamm-bear”, like some who have come through the NHL before him, would be incorrect. The Swift Current, Saskatchewan native goes with the hard ‘T’, as in Lam-bert.
If Hockey Night in Canada reporter Elliotte Friedman is correct, Lambert might finally be getting the opportunity he so richly deserves. He’s considered a frontrunner for the Kraken head coaching job.
Recently the 60-year-old briefly became a head coach in the NHL, in what seemed to be an unstable situation in New York with the Islanders. Despite a winning record through a year-and-a-half, he was replaced by Hall of Fame goalie Patrick Roy mid-season in 2023-’24.
Seattle Thunderbirds fans might recall, Roy was coming off the 2023 Memorial Cup championship in Kamloops the previous spring as the head coach with the Quebec Remparts.
This past season Lambert served as the associate coach under Craig Berube for the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team bounced in the second round of the playoffs. That opened the door for the Kraken to give him a look.
Lambert has been coaching in the NHL since 2011 after a decade in the major junior Western Hockey League and then in the “triple-A” American Hockey League.
Reports also have David Quinn and Mitch Love interviewing for the job.
Quinn hasn’t found success as a head man in the NHL with two different franchises in wildly different situations. That would be the New York Rangers and the rebuilding San Jose Sharks. In both scenarios, Quinn was hired for his Boston University connections to management. He’s 58.
Love is 40. He’s been an assistant with the Washington Capitals the last two seasons. In the five years prior to that, Love found remarkable success as a head coach in both the WHL and AHL.
