Patrick Roy's coaching route

Eric Duhatschek

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Patrick Roy, second on the NHL's career wins list among goaltenders and the only three-time winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs' most valuable player, took a different route to coaching in junior hockey. In 1997, still in the prime of his career, he and two other men invested in the Beaufort Harfangs franchise in the QMJHL. They eventually changed the team's name to the Remparts and shifted it to the Colisée in Quebec City.

When Roy made the investment, he said he could not have predicted he would be coaching the team in less than 10 years. Instead, Roy says his primary motivation was to give something back to his community.

"Today, I realize I was very fortunate to have two good partners [Michel Cadrin and Jacques Tanguay] with me because if I had been by myself, I don't know if it would have been that successful."

Roy says it was only toward the end of his playing career that he "started to realize that maybe this was something that I'd like to do."

"When I retired," Roy said, "I decided to come here and be the GM of the team. I was a bit bored. I wanted a bit more, so I started coaching bantam, and after my second year bantam, I decided to try it as a coach in junior."

Roy became the Remparts' head coach in September of 2005 and won a Memorial Cup in his first year, becoming the seventh coach in history to do so and the first since Claude Julien with the Hull Olympiques in 1997.

If the opportunity to coach in the NHL came along, is that something Roy would be open to?

"That'd be possible," he said. "I'm not saying yes. I'm not saying no. But I will think of it. As we speak, I don't have to because nothing's happened, but if one day there's a team that knocks on my door and says, would you like to try that experience, I'll have to think about it. … I don't close the door for sure."

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