Duhatschek: Johnston brings a personal touch to Penguins

In the summer, soon after landing his first-ever NHL head-coaching gig with the Pittsburgh Penguins, Mike Johnston embarked on a world tour to meet and greet many of his new players. He travelled to Atlantic Canada to visit with Sidney Crosby, out to Alberta to meet with Brandon Sutter and then down to Minnesota for a conversation with Paul Martin.

But the furthest-flung journey was to Moscow, where he'd been frequently in the past with Canada's men's national team, because he wanted to spend some time with Evgeni Malkin. Malkin and Sergei Gonchar, a former Penguin, train together in the summers – they both have condos in the same Moscow high-rise; on the day Johnston arrived, he was invited along to watch that morning's training exercise. Fascinating stuff, for a student of the game.

"Sometimes, they'd go to a gym, but sometimes, like the day we were there, they'd go right out into this wooded area outside Moscow and do typical old-school Soviet training," Johnston said. "They'd go for a run, or they'd do jumping jacks, and calisthenics. They had some weights out there that they buried in the sand and uncovered, so they didn't have to carry them back and forth every day. It was good. I enjoyed it."

Johnston's plan was to meet many of his key players personally so that when the hubbub of training camp was under way, he wasn't introducing himself to them for the first time.

"You can picture it, coming into training camp, if I hadn't had a chance to see these guys before, I'd walk in and say, 'Hi, how are you doing, good to know you, we're going to get camp going.' And then you've got 50 guys around for 10 days and we're playing games and we're in different cities, so …

"I thought it was really beneficial to meet with them in their hometowns, because they were relaxed. They were comfortable. It wasn't investigative – what's gone on in the past, what do we have to do differently? I can do that on my own. It was just a chance to get to know them and their family history."

At 57, after a coaching career that began more than 30 years ago at Camrose College in Alberta, Johnston landed perhaps the most intriguing NHL job opening of all – coaching the Penguins, a team with star power and high expectations that saw a massive front-office shake-up this past off-season, after losing in the second round of the playoffs to the New York Rangers. The Penguins won the 2009 Stanley Cup and, with Crosby and Malkin as the centrepieces, the thinking was that they'd have had a couple more by now. Instead, they have only advanced as far as the conference final once in the interim.

But Johnston stresses that in these early days, the playoffs are the furthest thing from their collective minds. The goal is to build a foundation – what Johnston calls the "the good habits and details of the game and to lay the groundwork for hopefully our success later in the season."

Under former coach Dan Bylsma, the Penguins largely played a dump-and-chase style, which will likely change to more of a puck-possession game under Johnston.

Crosby's first impression of Johnston was of "a very calm guy, with a really good idea of how he wants us to play. That was pretty clear, from meeting him. As players, we've just got to be ready to absorb a lot of information over the next couple of weeks because there's going to be a lot of new things thrown at us. So you're thinking from a team perspective and from an individual point of view – what do I have to do and how can I adjust my game to do the most in my situation?

"All that stuff is not a bad thing," Crosby concluded. "As a player, you want to get better and you want to learn. That never gets old for me."

According to Crosby, the Penguins' second-round exit weighed heavily on him, noting that: "At the time when all the changes were happening, you take a lot of responsibility on your own shoulders because you don't like being on a team where the coaches are let go. That's not easy to deal with. But I think at this point, we've turned the page and we're all eager to prove ourselves again with a new coach."

As for Johnston, he spent a lot of time waiting for his first NHL head-coaching opportunity to come along. Does the Penguins' job feel like the culmination of a long journey?

"Obviously, to coach in the NHL is a dream for every coach and it's something you aspire to," Johnston answered, "but I never really was anxious to get anywhere except for that next little step along the way. I could have stayed in Portland for another five years and really enjoyed it. There's never been a place where I felt, 'Okay, I'm paying my dues here.' It was never like that – anywhere along the way."