Personnel director gets back to the game

Barber, who lost his wife last year, joined the Lightning in August.

By BRUCE LOWITT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 2, 2002

BRANDON -- Bill Barber wasn't supposed to be here this season as director of player personnel for the Lightning. Truth be told, he wasn't supposed to be anywhere in the NHL.

"Knowing what I know now," he said, "if my partner was still here with me I think I would have taken the time off."

Partner. That's what he calls Jenny.

The dozen years he had spent in a Flyers uniform, all the years after that, scouting, coaching -- all the time he didn't spend with Jenny in their 28-year marriage.

The children were grown, long gone. The last half of last year and the first half of this -- the hockey season -- would be Bill's and Jenny's, he decided.

If they could stand each other that long.

Barber laughed. "Eventually she would have shoved me back to work, no question. I think she would understand you can only do that for so long. You can't always be in one another's laps.

"But I never was," he said after a moment. "I didn't know -- I don't know -- what it would be like."

They and the kids, Kerri and Brooks, got to spend her final five days together at home in Cherry Hill, N.J., away from the hospital. At 12:05 p.m. on Dec. 8, Jenny lost her battle with cancer. She was 48.

There was a game that afternoon against the Minnesota Wild. Jenny and the kids, he said, told him he belonged behind the Philadelphia bench. He was there for the 3 p.m. faceoff. He told only a few veteran Flyers before the game that Jenny had died. The Flyers won 5-1. Only then did he tell the rest of the team. The players and their coach wept together.

Barber had replaced fired Flyers coach Craig Ramsay (now Lightning associate coach) almost exactly a year earlier. They were 31-13-7-3 under him and won the Atlantic Division. Barber won the Jack Adams Trophy as NHL coach of the year. The Flyers rewarded him with a three-year contract. Philadelphia didn't make it past the first round of playoffs.

In 2001-02 the Flyers finished second in the division. Again, they didn't get past the first round. In five games they scored two goals. Some stars on the high-payroll team said Barber wasn't a good teacher, a good leader, a good coach. Barber was fired. "I got real stupid real quick," he said with a grin.

"I understand frustration, but when you start finger-pointing and stuff, I think all that speaks for itself. If there's blame, we all should be blamed. Don't just point your finger and say, 'Well, it's the coach.' It was pretty hard to digest that we went along at a high level all year but when push came to shove (in the playoffs) we didn't know what we were doing."

Lightning general manager Jay Feaster immediately called Barber. Their relationship goes back to 1990 when Feaster was GM of the AHL Hershey Bears, a Flyers affiliate, and Barber was a Flyers scout and then Bears coach.

They met at Barber's second home, in Sarasota. "Jay told me, 'I need a hockey guy at my side. We'd like you to be that guy,' " Barber said. "I was mentally and physically tired. My daughter's wedding was coming up. I said, 'Jay, I can't commit 'cause my heart's not there.' "

Feaster said Lightning president Ron Campbell didn't pressure him to have a player personnel director in place before the draft or by some artificial deadline.

"Billy and I would talk every couple of weeks, like, 'How's it going?' But by August we needed to have someone on board," Feaster said. "We were running out of time"

It was about then, Barber said, that "I woke up one morning at home and asked myself, 'What am I going to do here?' It was a case of retiring or taking the year off, but without my partner ...

"I love the game, love being around it, and I can be helpful. This is the best thing for me right now. I'm very lucky to have been approached and told, 'We'd love to have you.' There's probably a lineup of 200 people that would love to have my job."

Feaster's expertise is in contract negotiations, and he will have the final say on all player personnel moves. Barber will be consulted on all trades and transactions, scout other teams for players who might be trade bait and scout the Lightning farm system.

"He's the guy I'm going to look to from a hockey standpoint," Feaster said. "He's done everything in the game. I'm going to rely on him heavily."

More training camp cuts are coming. Lightning uniforms will be exchanged for Springfield Falcons or Pensacola Ice Pilots uniforms. Or street clothes. Barber knows what he wants. More than just talent. "Good players do not make a good team," he said. "I think we found that out last year." We meant the Flyers.

"Heart and character, attitude," he said during a recent practice at the Ice Sports Forum. "I weigh that a lot. ... Is he playing with heart? Is he playing with the team or for himself? You don't have to be an Einstein to figure that out."

-- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.