Couch: Why Alan Haller and Jeff Blashill see Adam Nightingale as an ideal fit as MSU's new hockey coach

Michigan State’s hockey program is past the point of celebrating coaching hires. When you fire three in a row, the fourth is going to face a healthy dose of skepticism. 

Adam Nightingale is next up, his hiring as MSU's new hockey coach announced Tuesday. Like Danton Cole before him, Nightingale was most recently the head coach for the U.S. National Team Development Program. Nightingale’s name and pedigree, on their own, won’t break through the pessimism. He can only do that with what he produces on the ice, by lifting MSU’s program out of a decade-long abyss. 

But if you’re looking for some premature hope, you might find it in the process that landed MSU athletic director Alan Haller on Nightingale and in the folks who guided and/or endorsed the hire: Notable MSU alums Ryan Miller, Torey Krug, Justin Abdelkader, John-Michael Liles and Mike Porter — the five who made up Haller’s advisory group — and Haller's conversations with Anson Carter, Bryan Smolinski and others, including former Detroit Red Wings and Western Michigan University coach Jeff Blashill, who hired and promoted Nightingale in Detroit.

“In recruiting … people will want to pick up the phone and call Adam Nightingale because they believe in him as a coach, they believe in him as a person, they'll want their sons to play for him. Family advisors will want their potential clients to play for him,” Blashill said Tuesday.

The program has been missing that sort of juice for as long as any player currently being recruited can remember.

Part of what Haller realized in dismissing Cole last month, and in the weeks since, was just how far MSU had fallen from relevancy in college hockey, a slide that began well before Cole took the reins. Haller badly wanted to give the program a jolt with a splash hire. He and deputy AD Jen Smith interviewed five candidates, all of whom he said would be considered top candidates in the business.

However, like with the two previous coaching searches Haller led — which resulted in the hiring of MSU football coach Mel Tucker and volleyball coach Leah Johnson — Haller said he leaned heavily on his gut for what he thought the program needed and a firm set of criteria, this time established with his advisory group, Miller, Krug, Abdelkader, Liles and Porter.

“I knew what I didn’t know,” Haller said. “They didn't push a particular candidate. They all were very clear that we want our hockey program back in the elite status in the country. And it didn't matter to them who that person was that brought us there."

Among the priorities: Skill development, player relationships, style of play — a fast-paced game attractive to today’s player. Haller also wanted a head coach out front in recruiting, which isn’t always the case in college hockey.

“I just kept coming back to the criteria, the process. And some of the big names that I talked to, I just did not necessarily feel like they were the the right choice for us,” Haller said “They’re very successful where they're at. Now, I didn't get to the offer stage (with them), so I don't know if they would have actually accepted.

“Adam fit the criteria. We need to reestablish ourselves in the recruiting world. We need a hockey identity. And I just thought Adam fit that.”

Nightingale, 42, is an MSU alum, like his past two predecessors. He is not a product of Ron Mason’s MSU hockey program, however. He played first at Lake Superior State and transferred to MSU to play for Rick Comley in the early 2000s. He came back to East Lansing as the program’s director of operations under Comley and then Tom Anastos from 2010-14, so he’s had a good look at the state of things in recent times.

From MSU, he coached a year of high school hockey in Minnesota at Shattuck St. Mary’s, where he won a national title in 2016, before taking a job as a video coach with the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. He was also the video coordinator for the U.S. men’s national team at that time, working alongside Blashill, the U.S. team’s head coach, at the 2017 World Championships.

“That’s when I really got to know him,” Blashill said. “And we had an opening (with the Red Wings) for an assistant coach in charge of video. It was a no-brainer. Right away, I saw a special person, really an elite person. His ability to connect with people was excellent. His ability to get people to follow him. He’s somebody everybody wants to be around. You could just see that, that type of personality. But he’s always very intelligent, very calm under pressure.”

Blashill, who later promoted Nightingale to full-fledged assistant coach, further described him as someone players were drawn to for advice and “a sounding board for me, somebody whose opinion I really respected,” for reasons that included his ability to problem solve.

That’ll come in handy now. MSU hockey is definitely a problem to solve.

Blashill’s full-fledged endorsement should mean something, because of his NHL ties and because before he was the Red Wings' head coach for seven seasons — and a Wings assistant and the Grand Rapids Griffins’ coach before that — he spent a year resurrecting Western Michigan’s long-dormant program. WMU, which went 8-20-8 the season before he arrived in 2010 and hadn’t had a winning season in eight years, reached the CCHA championship game and the NCAA tournament in Blashill’s lone season before the Red Wings scooped him up. Blashill is the standard for quick rebuilds in college hockey and is held in high regard in terms of developing young talent. 

He’s known Nightingale since MSU's new coach was a recruit out of Cheboygan and Blashill was a volunteer assistant at Ferris State, which was recruiting Nightingale.

“I think there are two huge keys to getting Michigan State's program where everybody that is passionate about Michigan State wants it to be at,” Blashill said. “One is culture and one is recruiting. First with recruiting, I think Adam's got the connections, the relationships, having spent time at a lot of different levels. 

“And then within that, you have to build the right culture. And when you are a person who has the integrity, the winning qualities that Adam Nightingale has, I think it'll be easy to build that culture. And one of the things I think is really important, as Adam recruits high-end players, is that those guys are passionate about the team and about creating a great team and not being individuals. And I think Adam's done an excellent job without that with the National Team Development Program, of getting a bunch of really high-end players to buy in.

“The other thing I would say, with Adam, in terms of recruiting is, he's coached at the highest level, he's coached in the National Hockey League. He can, without a shadow of a doubt, sit down with recruits and tell them that he can help prepare them for the National Hockey League and he knows what it's going to take for players to reach that level.”

If recruits begin to look at MSU differently, that'll be a start.

RELATED:  Couch: As MSU hockey starts over again with a new coach, here's what matters and what no longer does

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.