Terry Frei
On Monday night at Ball Arena, Avalanche defenseman Josh Manson will look over to the opposing bench and be able to spot his father, Dave Manson.
Dave had a long NHL playing career with the Blackhawks, Oilers, Jets, Canadiens, Blackhawks (again), Stars and Maple Leafs. (As an Oiler, he once had a scrap with Paul MacDermid, father of Avalanche enforcer Kurtis MacDermid.)
Since retiring as a player, he has been an assistant and associate coach with major junior’s Prince Albert (Saskatchewan) Raiders, and an assistant with the Bakersfield Condors of the AHL.
When the Oilers’ respected GM, Ken Holland, fired Dave Tippett as coach on Feb. 10, he elevated Bakersfield coach Jay Woodcroft — and Manson came with him. They were and are considered an effective tandem, with Manson providing the veteran voice of a former NHL player in support of Woodcroft.
The Oilers’ new coach played at Alabama-Huntsville and in the AHL, UHL and Germany, and then signed on as video coach on Mike Babcock’s staff at Detroit.
Eight days later the Oilers made the coaching change, they beat the Ducks 7-3 in Edmonton. Josh was injured and didn’t play.
After he joined the Avalanche last week, Josh said his father has provided guidance, about both on-ice and off-ice issues.
One of the interesting details of their backgrounds is that Dave, the father, both played and coached in major junior (in Prince Albert) on each side of his NHL career, while Josh, his son, took the Junior A-to-NCAA route to pro hockey and the NHL.
Josh spent two seasons with the Salmon Arm Silverbacks of the British Columbia Hockey League before the Ducks took him in the sixth round of the 2011 draft. After his time in Junior A, which preserved his NCAA eligibility, he played three seasons at Northeastern as the Ducks followed his progress.
Actually, as a youth, he was far more enamored of snowboarding than hockey and at age 12 came close to giving up on hockey completely.
“Hockey was never my passion,” he said after the Avalanche’s Sunday practice at Family Sports Center. “I grew up around the rink, obviously, with my dad and he would take me to the rink and I’d have great experiences and I have great memories of doing that. But I don’t know if it was from moving. I played hockey when we traveled and my dad got traded, but I never felt like I took to it. I just didn’t understand it maybe. I can’t really put my finger on it.
“We moved back to Prince Albert and I played hockey and I wasn’t crazy about it. I think I had one coach I was worried about going to the next level. I was snowboarding every day, I loved snowboarding. . . At the end of the season, I came to my mom [Lana] and I said, ‘I don’t think I want to play next year. I would rather just snowboard and rather hang out and do that kind of stuff.'”
Josh said his mom’s response was, “No chance, buddy. You gotta see this thing through.”
“Thank goodness she did because that was the year I ended up loving my coach and hockey was in my grasp for me,” Josh said. “It wasn’t even my dad. That’s what’s funny. Everybody thinks my dad would be the one to say, ‘No way, you gotta play hockey.’ It was my mom.”
And he ended up on the path to the NHL.
“He was extremely supportive in whatever direction I took,” Josh said of his dad and the junior A vs. major journey paths. “It came to a point where we had to make a decision and my mom and my dad both said, ‘I’m going to leave it all up to you, whatever you feel more comfortable with at the end of the day…’ He was really happy with the choice. He knew my development. I was a late bloomer. I needed the time to grow into my body and develop my game so he was happy with my decision at the end of the day.”
On a Zoom call last week after he was traded to the Avalanche, Josh said of his dad: “He’s been amazing through that my entire life. being able to compartmentalize things for me and be the hockey dad when he needs to be the hockey dad be just dad when he needs to be dad. So I’m very grateful for that.
“He hasn’t given me a lot of tips since he came up to Edmonton. We still chat, but it’s a little bit different dynamic now. He still does a great job, obviously, talking with me and saying what he needs to say.”
I asked Josh about father and son opposing one another in the NHL, with Western Conference teams.
“I don’t think it’ll be too weird,” Josh said. “We do a good job of keeping things where they need to be and still maintaining that father-son relationship. He’s been coaching, maybe not professionally, for a long time, but he cut his teeth in the WHL (with Prince Albert) for quite some time, so we’ve been going through it ever since I was a young kid.
“He’s been coaching as I was growing up, coming through juniors and college and then my first couple of years in the minors and in the NHL. it’s nothing really new to us, just the only difference now is he’s at the NHL level and we’re playing in the same league against each other.”
Josh and Dave were planning to meet for dinner Sunday night.
“We have a pretty close bond, so it would be weird if I didn’t,” he said.
In his two games with the Avalanche, Josh has logged ice time of 18:41 (against the Kings) and 26:30 (against the Sharks), mostly playing with Ryan Murray, and is a plus-1. Additional trades before the Monday deadline could change the Avalanche D corps, but without more changes, the major manpower issue is whether Bo Byram — who continues to take part in practice in a red no-contact jersey — can return before the playoffs.
“I’ve liked him a lot,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said of Manson’s play so far. “I like his physicality, his ability to get the puck stopped in the D zone. He’s been pretty good on the penalty kill. He’s still learning the systems but his puck play has been good.”
Manson noted “the systems that they run here are a lot different than what they run in Anaheim. It’s tough because you have these habits you follow through on the ice. . . I have to think through everything. It’ll take the half step or whatever it is to catch up. I’m going to keep working on it every day and trying to figure it out. It’s just getting comfortable, knowing where your support is, knowing where your automatics are and you can just go there.”
He said the Avalanche “plays really fast. They’re crazy fast. They work hard, they play well in the system. I think the biggest thing that I recognize from my time in Anaheim compared to now is that everybody was pretty reliable. Everybody kind of trusts in each other. You didn’t have to work to do anybody else’s job. It was, ‘Well you know he’s going to do that.’ As a five-man unit you play that fast because everybody’s working the same direction.”
Of course, Colorado is prime snowboarding country and some of the top snowboarders in the world live and train to the west of Denver.
“I was looking at the mountains and it didn’t do anything for me,” he said. “I’m a hockey player now.”
Terry Frei ([email protected], @tfrei) is a Denver-based author and journalist. He has been named a state’s sportswriter of the year seven times in peer voting — four times in Colorado and three times in Oregon. His seven books include the novels “Olympic Affair” and “The Witch’s Season.” Among his five non-fiction works are “Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming,” “Third Down and a War to Go,” “March 1939: Before the Madness,” and “’77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age.” He also collaborated with Adrian Dater on “Save By Roy,” was a long-time vice president of the Professional Hockey Writers Association and has covered the hockey Rockies, Avalanche and the NHL at-large. His web site is www.terryfrei.com and his bio is available at www.terryfrei.com/bio.html
His Colorado Hockey Now column archive can be accessed here