EDMONTON — Davis Payne represents the new breed of NHL coach.
He’s a young, bright, former player, who worked himself up through the system and has been given the reins to a big-league club for the first time.
The St. Louis Blues interim head coach took over for the fired Andy Murray early in the New Year.
He went into Thursday night’s game against the Oilers with a 6-5-2 record.
“He’s obviously a younger coach,” said Blues captain Eric Brewer. “They’re both really hands-on coaches, we’re really well prepared with both of them, but they’re just different personalities.
“(Payne) is a little more laidback, maybe it’s just because he’s just coming in through the door, I don’t know. But he’s been good. Unfortunately it came at Andy’s expense, but maybe a change is what we needed in order to play a little better.”
The 39-year-old native of King Hill, Ont., was a former draft pick of the Oilers. He was selected in the seventh round, 140th overall, of the 1989 NHL draft out of Michigan Tech University.
“I think we can all admit in every draft there’s a few mistakes,” smiled Payne. “I was drafted then had four years of college and had back surgery due to a big injury my senior year.
“They (Oilers) decided to go another way and there were no hard feeling about it. I didn’t have the kind of senior year that you need in order to earn that contract, so I had to do it a different way. They had some quality teams and they had lineup decisions and contracts were tough to get and life kind of took me in a different direction.”
Payne was actually injured tying his skates in his senior year of college.
“I blew a disc in my back tying my skates,” he said. “I was bent over, reefing on the skate laces and blew it.”
After drafting the winger, the Oilers tried to convince Payne to leave college to go play junior hockey. However, he decided to stay in school and went on to get a biological sciences degree. He would probably be a veterinarian if he were not coaching in the NHL.
After parting ties with the Oilers, Payne went on to play in the ECHL and the IHL before landing an AHL contract with the Providence Bruins.
He got his first taste of NHL action during mid-season callup and was placed on a line with Adam Oates and Cam Neely.
“My first game up was in Buffalo I started with Oates and Neely,” Payne said. “It was kind of like that old line ‘One of these things doesn’t belong there’. But It was a great experience to get a chance to play on a line with those two guys in the league. It was pretty special.”
Payne went on to play 22 games for the Bruins in two years before heading back to the minor leagues for good. He ended up with the Greenville Grrrowl as a player/assistant coach.
During his second year in Greenville, an achilles injury ended his playing career and put him behind the bench permanently.
Payne worked his way through the ECHL before ending up with the Blues AHL affiliate in Peoria. He was promoted after Murray’s dismissal.
“It’s very rewarding to be up here —you get yourself involved with a group of people that you believe in and they believe in you, and then to have that opportunity pay off and to have that total trust that we’re in now, it’s extremely gratifying,” Payne said. “It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s good to be recognized by people that you’ve done a good job and you really appreciate that.
"But that job changes every single day and you have to keep going and you have to keep getting better and keep getting better as a coach.”
