[Dion]

10 years later - Flames players talk how Sutter motivated his team

“(Those letters were) huge — 4-0. SWEEP,” says Craig Conroy. “He’s like, ‘We’re already swept, guys. I guess we should just go home.’ He made a little joke. But he was serious.”

Point made, Sutter places the offending broadsheet on a shelf.

“No one threw the paper away,” says Conroy. “It just sat there.”

Hours later, the Calgary Flames return to the dressing room, 2-1 victors at Joe Louis Arena. Sutter marches back in, snatches the newspaper.

“He says, ‘You know how much this is worth?’ and he threw it in the garbage,” says Conroy. “He said, ‘They don’t just get to win four in a row. We can beat these guys.’ We were like, ‘You know what? He’s right.’ The more we won, the more we believed.”

“I couldn’t care less about his GM-ing,” says Warrener. “It was his ability to walk through the dressing room and know exactly what the mood of the team was — that was his greatest asset. He could walk in the room and, after two seconds, he would know whether it was, ‘OK, time to kick them in the pants,’ or time to have (Rich Preston) come in and tell a joke or time to give them the day off. He had that uncanny ability to know exactly what we needed.”

According to David Marcoux: “Darryl is telling our young guys (like Kobasew and Lombardi), ‘Listen, if you want Steve Yzerman’s autograph, if you want Chris Chelios’s autograph, just win the damn series and I’ll get Steve Yzerman’s autograph for you, Lombo.’ Guys are looking at Darryl like he had four eyes.”

Ask Commodore, whose nose was broken by a Patrick Marleau check. The red-headed defender, with tears and blood streaming down his face, gutted out the shift, then wobbled off the ice.

“Darryl just gave it to me on the bench,” says Commodore. “I’m thinking, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m a mess here. I can barely see you.’ But I didn’t say anything. I remember being pissed off. My attitude was, ‘You don’t like how that went? I’ll show you.’ I shook off the broken nose and went from there.”

“Craig exploded and started screaming at Darryl,” he says. “Connie was riled — I thought his head was going to explode. Then Darryl started clapping and said, ‘Here we go.’ And out of the dressing room (we went).

“I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ But we won the game.”

“Some coaches that are on you all the time . . . have favourites,” Clark says. “But if a coach is hard on the No. 1 guy all the way to the No. 25 guy? That’s getting the most out of everybody. That’s the way Darryl was. He was just as hard on Iggy as he was on me.”

http://www.calgaryherald.com/sports/...198/story.html