Mark Spector

The Calgary Flames are Mike Keenan’s eighth National Hockey League team, which means he has now coached more than one-quarter of the NHL’s 30 teams at one time or another.

There were good times in New York, where Keenan won his only Cup in 1994, and bad times in Vancouver, where the Canucks got absolutely nothing done during Keenan’s reign. And, there were incredibly stupid times, like when Keenan convinced ownership in Florida that trading goalie Roberto Luongo to Vancouver for a package including Todd Bertuzzi was good business.

Yikes!

So if you are the Calgary Flames of 2007-08, the question must be this: Which Mike Keenan did we hire this summer?

“I didn’t know what to think (about the hire),” Jarome Iginla said earlier this fall. “Mike is one of the NHL’s winningest coaches. He’s, uh, what can I say ... a hard-ass. But most coaches around the league are now.”

Did Calgary get the avant-garde coach whose only failing as an up-and-comer was that his Flyers ran up against Wayne Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers in ‘85 and ‘87, and his Blackhawks couldn’t handle Mario Lemieux and the Penguins in ‘92? Or does Calgary get a guy whom the game has passed by, not having coached a playoff game in more than a decade?

What Calgary got, by my reckoning, is exactly what Calgary needs. A motivator and a tactician who will get the most out of a team that will win the Northwest Division this season, and could well bring Cowtown only its second Stanley Cup.

Keenan is one of those managers in sports who lacks the patience to build a team from scratch. But if the foundation is solid, and only some fine tuning is required to put a team over the top, he is the perfect guy.

Calgary has one of the top three goalies in the game in Miikka Kiprusoff. They’ve got an above average blue-line, and a superstar up front in Iginla. The chess pieces are in place, and now, so is the grand master Keenan.

There wasn’t a more perplexing team in the NHL last season than the Flames. They were 30-9-2 at home, but staggered to a 13-20-8 mark on the road.

If a bad team loses hockey games, I tend to look to the players to find the problem. But when a team plays .750 hockey in their own building, then consistently leaves town only to get beat up on the road, that poses a question that defines what coaches are hired to answer.

The fact rookie Flames coach Jim Playfair spent the entire season searching in vain for that answer eventually cost him his job. And it should have.

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The man who fired him, Flames GM Darryl Sutter, recognized immediately that he had good team in Calgary, but it just needed a little push over the top. Keenan, meanwhile, had been a Blackhawks assistant coach when Sutter wound up his career as a heart and soul winger for the Blackhawks in the mid-80s, and it was Keenan who — once he had taken over behind Chicago’s bench – promoted Sutter from his coaching job in the minors to the position of associate coach with Chicago.

Keenan believed in Sutter then, just as Sutter believes in Keenan today. And frankly, who knows what is needed inside that Flames dressing room better than Sutter? After all, he was the coach who took the Flames all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final in 2004, a run that painted the ultimate picture of a coach who knew exactly which buttons to press to squeeze maximum success out of a team that had barely qualified for the post-season.

This Flames team is better than that one, but it under-performed last season. And anyone who knows Mike Keenan will tell you, a talented but under-performing team — and one with plenty of veteran players like Calgary — is the prototype for Iron Mike.