Mike Keenan with the Calgary Flame players.

AFP/Moscow

Although fiery Canadian ice hockey coach Mike Keenan has been compared to Stalin throughout his decorated career, it turns out he actually does a pretty good Lenin impersonation.
Keenan, who is into his third season at the helm of Metallurg Magnitogorsk in Russia’s top hockey league, recently made a star turn as the Bolshevik revolutionary in a promotional video for the club.
“I don’t know if I am a revolutionary or not,” said Keenan, who actually resembles Lenin with his thinning hair and sweeping arm gestures. “Maybe in the hockey world, I might be a little bit.”
Nicknamed “Iron Mike” for his tough coaching style and temper tantrums, Keenan first made the long-distance move to Magnitogorsk, a gritty steel city of 400,000 people just east of Russia’s Ural Mountains, in 2013.  
That journey to the depths of Russia came after a career in which Keenan coached eight different National Hockey League (NHL) teams in North America over 20 seasons, served as a general manager and dabbled in broadcasting.
In his debut season in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), Keenan, 65, led Metallurg to their first Gagarin Cup, making him the only coach to have won a championship in both the NHL and KHL, the world’s top two leagues. Keenan, who coached the New York Rangers to the NHL’s Stanley Cup in 1994, has thrived in a league, and country, that is growing hostile to foreign presence.
The KHL last year adopted a five foreign-player limit for its Russian clubs and foreign trainers have fallen out of fashion.
But a foreign passport has not been a factor for Keenan, who has been embraced by the Russian public, perhaps because he has gone out of his way to immerse himself in his new environment.  
He made headlines this summer by publicly musing about applying for Russian citizenship and charmed the public with an inspired locker-room karaoke performance in broken Russian after winning the Gagarin Cup.  
“It’s better for me to understand than to be understood,” said Keenan, who ranks seventh among coaches for all-time NHL wins with 672 victories.
“It’s my responsibility. I’m the import now, I’m the foreigner.”
Keenan, whose players at times have accused him of being unnecessarily harsh and irascible, has been called the most “Russian-like coach the team has ever had” by Metallurg’s management.
Although Metallurg have surrounded him with an English-speaking entourage, Kennan knows enough Russian to give instructions on the ice—like “faster” and “let’s go”—and negotiate his way around Magnitogorsk.
“They definitely understand what we are speaking about most of the time,” Keenan said of his Russian players.

‘Win or win’
Metallurg, winners of 9 of 11 games this season, rank second in the KHL’s eastern conference.
“The expectations here are the same as in the NHL. You better win,” said Keenan, whose injury-plagued team lost in the conference semifinals last year. “It’s win or win.”
After two decades of NHL life, the far-flung KHL presents other challenges. Travel is extensive, with teams across more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) from the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok to the Croatian capital of Zagreb.
The 60-game schedule, compared to 82 regular-season games in the NHL, also gives teams less margin for error.
Keenan said he was happy in Magnitogorsk but has not abandoned his desire for another job in the NHL, where he last coached the Calgary Flames in 2009.
With another Gagarin Cup within reach, Keenan has shown no sign of slowing down, although he concedes he no longer coaches with the same fury as when he landed his first NHL job in 1984 as a stick-breaking 34-year-old.
“My style has a thread of consistency,” he said. “But I think the methodology has changed.”