Lane Lambert was in the air above the Mississippi River, trying to grab onto the armrest.
It was Jan. 9, 2009, six days before Sully Sullenberger became a household name, and the Milwaukee Admirals’ flight from Memphis to San Antonio had started with a loud bang. Upon takeoff, something had gone wrong when the pilot tried to bring the landing gear up.
Now they were circling the Mississippi with Lambert, the team’s head coach, competing with his assistant, Brad Lauer, for the best piece of plastic to hold onto.
“They were sending messages home,” the team’s radio announcer Aaron Sims recalled.
The plane hovered around for a bit as tension hung, before landing back in Memphis without any dramatics. Everyone took a deep breath, calmed themselves, had a beverage or two, then got back on the plane. The Admirals ended up losing that night in overtime.
Afterwards, Lambert burst into the room.
“Boys,” he said. “That’s the best f–king point you’ll ever earn in your life.”
Before being named the Islanders’ new coach last month, Lambert had not held a head-coaching job since that stint with the Admirals, the Predators’ AHL affiliate, from 2007-11, going the next 11 years as an assistant on Barry Trotz’s staffs in Nashville, Washington and New York. Speak to those who worked with him all those years ago and a picture comes into focus quickly.
Lambert is a renowned communicator, someone who knows when to cut the tension and when to lay into a room. He’s unsparing but empathetic; intense but warm. Stories about him tend to fall into two buckets: screaming at someone, or showing extreme humanity.
“He looks you in the eye when he talks and he truly cares,” said Blake Geoffrion, who played parts of two seasons under Lambert in Milwaukee. “He wants to know how your family is and how you’re doing and what’s going on. It’s not like he’s doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I think he has a really good feel for people.”
For an Islanders team that underachieved last season, Lambert could be the person to unlock a group of young players who need to take strides, even if he isn’t exactly someone new.
Though he’d been considered one of the league’s better head-coaching candidates for some time, his hire required some explanation just a week after GM Lou Lamoriello said he ousted Trotz in part because he wanted a “new voice.” The best explanation, though, comes from the players for whom his voice resonated over a decade ago.
Jon Blum was 20 years old and feeling the pressure of being a first-round pick. It was his first time playing against grown men, dealing with the travel and scrutiny and pace of professional hockey. Lambert pulled him aside.
He told Blum not to overthink things. If his job was to pin someone against the wall, he didn’t need to worry about getting the puck, too. Someone else would handle that.
“It made everything easier,” Blum said. “You’re just some 20-year-old kid out of juniors, can’t even grow facial hair-type situation. Just having the head coach in your corner from Day 1 and telling you that he believes in you, it felt good inside, and you want to do everything you can to help that coach win. You want to block that shot.
“There are some coaches you don’t like and stuff like that, you just kinda tune out. Lane was a guy you want to go to war with.”
Years after playing for Lambert, Blum recalled discussing his mother’s cancer with him. Lambert’s first wife, Andi, was going through treatment for cancer at the same time, and they’d lean on each other in support.
“That really made the difference,” Blum said.
He is far from the only person for whom Lambert has done something like that.
Sims, the Admirals’ radio announcer, not only recalled similar conversations with Lambert when his own wife had cancer, but said that Lambert helped inspire him to deal with his weight. One day in the Admirals’ offices, Lambert looked at him and told him to take better care of himself. For about 15 minutes, he talked to Sims about taking care of his body. It stuck. Ten years later, when he had bariatric surgery, Sims thought back to that conversation.
“It’s one of the more loving things that has happened to me,” Sims said. “And I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him. It certainly wasn’t easy for me to sit there and listen to him tell me how fat I was and how it was hurting me. But he took the time to do it.”
When Drew MacIntyre, an Admirals goaltender, had his first child, Lambert and his wife were right there to give his family the necessary support. MacIntyre’s wife was two weeks overdue, leading to a C-section and a stressful ordeal. On more than one occasion, Lambert told MacIntyre he was not to join the team on a road trip, and to stay with his wife. And when the child was born, Lambert’s wife was there to help the MacIntyres, despite dealing with her own medical situation.
“The last handful of summers, I’ve been kind of crossing my fingers waiting for him to get an opportunity as a head coach in the NHL,” said MacIntyre, now the goalie coach for the AHL Manitoba Moose. “I knew it was coming.”
In a one-on-one conversation with an underperforming player, Lambert’s first question was always about what was going on off the ice.
As someone who knows firsthand what effect that can have on someone — Andi had breast cancer for 17 years before dying in 2015 — Lambert always operated with empathy first.
“Some coaches say the door’s always open,” said Cal O’Reilly, who played under Lambert for three seasons. “Really it’s not open for some coaches. But for him I felt it was.”
That, however, does not mean he was blinded to his players’ issues on the ice.
“What I think Lane’s really good at is he identifies those players that are not playing up to par,” Geoffrion said. “He meets with them, figures out why and gets them going again with whatever it is.”
For Geoffrion, that moment came in a 2010-11 game against Rockford, when he was bullied in the crease by Garnet Exelby. The following day, Lambert ripped him in a video session, telling him to stand up for himself.
That night, Milwaukee played Rockford again. Exelby tried to push Geoffrion around again. This time, Geoffrion fought back.
“I get my ass beat,” Geoffrion said. “And I came back to the bench and the first guy that welcomed me was Lane. He goes, ‘F–king right, I love it! Attaboy, watch the space now that you did that. Watch this.’ And he was right. I got more space.”
That intensity is typical of Lambert. Though he has one indulgence, golf, his preferred habit is to tee off early in the morning, get to the rink without missing anything and stay deep into the night. Mark Van Guilder, another former player, recalled being on the course in the evening and getting a text from Lambert about what he saw on tape.
“The stuff like that always stuck out to me,” Van Guilder said. “That and his pure hatred of losing.”
Van Guilder remembers a random overtime loss one year, the kind of midseason game that everyone moves on from as soon as it ends. The team was back in the locker room, already out of its uniforms. Lambert was still on the bench.
“He’s out there slamming the gate, the box, still giving it to the officials,” Van Guilder said. “He cared so much. It was, I don’t know, Game 63 of 80, and he was out there just giving it to the officials. So I think as a player, you love that.”
Years later, his attention to detail, his teaching ability and his devotion still stick out to those who have played for him. Dean Evason, currently the coach of the Minnesota Wild, had the Admirals job soon after Lambert, from 2012-18. Multiple people interviewed for this story compared the two without prompting.
“He’s playing to win,” Lauer said. “He’s got that fire in him, that’s what he wants. He’s a competitor.”
Late in the 2011 season, Lambert, Sims and the team’s travel secretary met for a drink. Lambert had been coaching the Admirals for four seasons, a relatively long stint for an AHL coach, and Sims brought up the question of his future.
Lambert told him that nothing was official yet, but the Predators had told him the plan was to promote him to Trotz’s assistant coach for the next season. When management had asked Lambert that same question about what he saw for himself, he’d turned it around on them.
“Lane wanted to know, ‘Are you gonna just throw me away? What do you have in store for me?’ And that was the plan,” Sims said.
It’s unknown whether Lambert asked the same question to Lamoriello at some point this May. But any doubt he might have had about how the Islanders viewed his future was answered resoundingly when Lamoriello made his coaching search quick and easy, hiring Lambert just a week after firing Trotz.
It’s a chance his former protégés have been waiting to see him get.
“When I showed up, I was like, how is this guy not coaching in the NHL?” Van Guilder said. “That was 13, 14 years ago.”
And now, after all the waiting and all the work, Lambert finally has his chance.
