[Dion]

The Zen of Sutter

The manner in which he communicates made it difficult to comprehend his Zen early on; writers would strain to hear him and the playback on their recorders was unintelligible in stretches. The Kings had to boost the level of the microphones in the interview room for broadcast because of the absence of volume in his voice.

His players finally admitted that for the first couple of weeks, they had trouble fully comprehending his instructions.

"I couldn't understand anything he said when he first came, so I made sure I was on the back of the line during drills," Doughty jokingly recalls.

I'm starting to think that we're all getting punked and at some point he'll come clean and admit it by using one of his Sutterisms, "It's all a part of the master plan."

After a strong effort by Penner one evening, Sutter likened him to Mark Messier which had us make a move to our Blackberry to advise the Twitter world of that beauty. Sutter spied me and chirped, "You had to sit down after that one, eh?"

After the Game 3 victory against St. Louis, and while waiting for the ever growing media throng to assemble, he plunked himself down in the first row of seats like one of us as to suggest that a media member to step up and be subjected to the same repetitive queries he does.

http://www.thefourthperiod.com/colum.../db120506.html