Winning Stanley Cups not new to Ramsay family

So he learned. In time, he would establish one of the longest consecutive game streaks in NHL history. Since retiring 25 years ago, he has made the game his life, working for six NHL clubs as coach or talent evaluator. A seventh team, the Atlanta Thrashers, just made him their head coach. And while maybe the accounting thing never worked out, Ramsay can tally up his family portfolio with the Stanley Cup.

Craig Ramsay won the NHL title six seasons ago as an assistant in Tampa Bay. His two eldest sons have been part of the last two Stanley Cup championships. Travis was a video coordinator with Pittsburgh and Jad a scout with Chicago.

“So, we’ve had three Stanley Cups in six years in the family,” said Ramsay. “Which is kind of cool.”

It is an unlikely story that has brought him to Philips Arena, but also kind of cool. Ramsay, 59, was born in Weston, Ontario. Parents Bill, who climbed poles for Bell Telephone before becoming a construction manager for the city of Toronto, and Barbara, a homemaker, were avid golfers. The oldest of his two sisters is an accomplished squash player, recently winning a gold medal in the World Senior Championships.

But hockey was off the family map and Ramsay got lucky straight away. When he ventured to Peterborough, he met coach Roger Neilson and the two would later cross paths in several stops in the NHL. With just three shirts and two pairs of pants, Ramsay hoped to last through a weekend tryout.

Then he was asked to stay another week. Then, he was asked to stay and play for the Junior B team, which he declined and returned to Weston. Ramsay, who loved math and history, was looking forward to college when a few months later, he got a letter from Neilson, asking him to return and guaranteeing him a roster spot on the Junior A team for the rest of the season.

It wound up being no bargain.

“I was 150 pounds against very large people,” Ramsay said. “You could be up to 21 in juniors in those days and it was a very dangerous occupation. They tried to kill me.”

But there, Ramsay’s life took a new direction. He admits he wasn’t very good at first but by age 18, he had grown into a player with some potential. By his fourth and final season in Peterborough, he began to think that a career in professional hockey was a possibility.

“Roger convinced me that I should give it a try and stay with it,” Ramsay said.

Peterborough is also where he met his wife of now 39 years. Susan Gibson was the daughter of the town’s Junior B manager. Her brother, Doug Gibson, would play in the NHL. In time, the Ramsays would have four children – sons Travis, Jad, Brendon and daughter Summer.

Ramsay's intuition played out. By 1971, he had become a solid left wing, good enough for Buffalo to select him 19th overall in the draft. (That was the second round, he points out now.)

But his rise was as quick as it was permanent. Ramsay played just 19 games with AHL Cincinnati, where current Thrashers general manager Rick Dudley was a teammate. Then he was called up to Buffalo, where he spent 14 seasons in the NHL. He got his first point in his second game, setting up a goal by Eddie Shack. A few days later, he scored three times in one game. “Everybody thought they had a star scorer,” Ramsay said. He ended up playing 57 games that first season – and scored a total of six goals.

He earned a reputation for his defensive play and would win the Selke Award in his final season (1985) as the best defensive forward in the league. But there was also a secret to his long NHL career, according to Dudley, who was later his linemate and roommate in Buffalo. He claims Ramsay, who owns the fourth longest consecutive game streak in the NHL at 776, would conveniently miss the entire exhibition season.

“I guarantee you he played less than 10 percent of the exhibition games in his career,” Dudley said. “But he played 776 straight games. That would seemingly be impossible to do, never play an exhibition game but play in all the regular season games. He somehow managed to do it. ... I don’t know how he’d do it but he’d get that pulled muscle the first day of training camp and it would be fine the last day.”

Ramsay’s long apprenticeship behind the bench began in Buffalo almost immediately after his retirement in 1985.. He spent two years with the Sabres, part of the last season as interim head coach. In 1993, he reunited with Neilson, who had been named coach of the expansion Florida franchise.

“Roger called me up on a Sunday night," Ramsay said, "and he said ‘Yeah, got the job in Florida. Want to come? Let me know? Bang.’ ... We got to pick our own team in Florida. Don’t get that often. ... Best expansion team ever. We missed the playoffs by a point two years in a row and Roger and I were rewarded with a firing. Great job, don’t let the door hit you when you leave.”

He next made a stop in Philadelphia, again with Neilson and would later serve as interim coach after Neilson went on medical leave with cancer. He would be fired 28 games into the 2000-2001 season. That led to stops as an assistant in Tampa Bay and then Boston the past three seasons.

Asked for his reflections on arriving here after his long road, Ramsay said. “Perhaps coming here on the plane [Sunday] I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’”

But he knows. Not an interim this time, this is an NHL lifer's best chance, and perhaps his last, to coach his own team on his terms with the security of knowing that his old roommate is his GM. Accounting could never be this fun.

“We want to create a whole atmosphere of team unity," he said. "We’ve got to get everybody on the same page. I’m excited to be in Atlanta and a part of this organization. No way is it about Craig Ramsay. It’s about all the people involved.”