Nottingham Panthers: Corey Neilson on search for 'Panther way' in Challenge Cup
- Published
Corey Neilson's first spell with Nottingham Panthers lasted 12 years, as both a player and head coach
Corey Neilson owns the Challenge Cup. Where it is, he is not entirely sure.
The Canadian lifted the domestic trophy on six occasions in his first stint as Nottingham Panthers boss.
After Panthers won a record five in a row they were given the silverware to keep, and an entirely new cup was minted as a replacement.
Think Brazil's national football team winning the World Cup for the third time in 1970 and being given the original Jules Rimet Trophy - just on ice.
Before his first Challenge Cup tie since returning to the Panthers, the 46-year-old smiles when asked where the 'Corey Cup' is.
"They gave me the 'Corey Cup' when they changed trophy - they said 'keep this, we have made a new one'," he recalls.
"I don't know where it is, but I'm going to say in the club office somewhere."
The cup that so defined Neilson's first glorious spell in charge of the club - one that yielded 12 major trophies to make him the most successful coach in Panthers history - could again come to shape his second stint.
Over two legs of their quarter-final against Belfast Giants, when aggregate goals come into play, Neilson hopes to see the struggling Elite Ice Hockey League (EIHL) side rediscover some of their lustre.
"Aggregate goals has honestly always favoured the Panthers because we could score," he said going into Thursday's home leg.
"Defence wins you play-offs and championships, but with aggregate goals you can lose 2-1 but then beat them 6-1 and aggregate scores come into play.
"We could reel teams in because we always had that one element we did really well - we could score. Yes, sometimes we were a bit sketchy defensively but we could score.
"Right now I want my players to be going a thousand miles an hour and we will find solutions to win."
Three head coaches held the top job at the Panthers in the four years between Neilson's two reigns.
None managed to deliver a major trophy, with Neilson being the last do so when he guided them to Continental Cup success in Europe in 2017.
When he returned to the National Ice Centre in October, Panthers were four points from the foot of the EIHL table. They had scraped through to the knockout stages of the Challenge Cup as the bottom-ranked side in the competition.
Neilson freely admits it "would take an awful lot to get to the top" of the EIHL, having overseen just two wins in six league games since returning - a run of results which leaves Panthers still just five points off the bottom.
Since landing back in the East Midlands after four years away coaching in Germany, Norway and Slovakia, Neilson has tried to rebuild the Panthers piece by piece in a three-week period he has approached as a "training camp".
"If you don't have a plan, I don't know how people expect to get to where you want to go," Neilson mused before their latest EIHL weekend, which included a 7-1 defeat by Manchester Storm before returning home to beat Cardiff Devils 5-2.
"So it's about forward planning - first learning to play without the puck, then learning to play with the puck, then trying to figure out how to do both. Hopefully it is locked in for the cup game.
"Everything is by design."
The final design he is building towards is the "Panther way" - re-establishing the club as one of the city's major sporting attractions, an entertainment brand that enjoyed a golden period of success.
"If we lose 5-4 right now, it's not the end of the world," Neilson said. "We are miles away from winning the league championship, but we can get ourselves in a position to do some damage when it comes to the cup competition.
"It is not a sports car, we can't just stop and go this way. No, it's a big boat that is going to take a lot of turning and lot of rudders to get it going the other way. It takes time.
"I'm being a realist, of course want to win that [EIHL title], but the priority has to be to bring back the energy, the joy of the players coming in to practice hard, and having fun practicing hard, playing hard and competing and showing fans they really care and want to win - showing we are trying our absolute best every time we get on the ice.
"That, I guess, is the Panther way."