EVERETT SILVERTIPS Ex-NHL coach promotes his junior hockey team

Kevin Constantine is back to the level where his coaching career began.
EVERETT, Wash. (AP) -- To promote the new junior hockey team in Everett, its coach drives in a 2003 forest green Dodge Durango that features a 3-foot-tall team logo.
This is a long ways from the limelight of the NHL, where Kevin Constantine coached in San Jose, Pittsburgh and New Jersey. But this is where he hopes to resurrect his coaching career, leading the expansion Everett Silvertips of the Western Hockey League, a junior league for players 16 to 20 years old.
It's a job that means being a promoter as well as the coach, which explains the paint job on his truck. But it's still hockey, the first love in Constantine's professional life.
"My career started at this level," he said. "We're going to see how much fun we can have with it."
NHL experience
Constantine coached in the NHL for all or part of six seasons, a total of 378 NHL regular-season games.
He coached the San Jose Sharks from the 1993-94 season into the 1995-96 season, the Pittsburgh Penguins from 1997-98 into '99-2000 and the New Jersey Devils for the final quarter of the 2001-2002 season after replacing Larry Robinson.
The Devils were 20-9-2 under Constantine in the regular season, but faltered in the playoffs, getting upset in the opening round by the Carolina Hurricanes. That was too much for owner Lou Lamoriello, whose Devils won the Stanley Cup two years before and lost to the Colorado Avalanche in seven games in the Stanley Cup Finals the previous season.
Constantine said he understood the decision.
"I just said, 'Look, this is the nature of the business I'm in and I'm not going to let it beat me up psychologically because I think I'm a good coach and I think I can help the players get better and I'm going to keep doing that,' " he said.
At the start of the 1993-94 season, Constantine was the youngest head coach in the NHL at 34.
Constantine got his current job coaching the first-year Silvertips because he placed a phone call to his old acquaintance, Doug "Soapy" Soetaert, 48, vice president and general manager of the new franchise.
The men worked together with the Kansas City Blades in the International Hockey League in the early 1990s.
Soetaert, who spent a dozen seasons in the NHL as a goaltender for the New York Rangers, the Winnipeg Jets and the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s and 1980s, understands what Constantine went through in the NHL.
"You're dealing with a lot of players who make a lot of money," he said. "The coaches really do run into problems after coaching two or three years up there. The players turn them off after two or three years. That's the unfortunate thing."
In June, Soetaert gave Constantine the Silvertips job.
"I wanted to make a statement to the players who were coming here that they were going to have the best coaching available," Soetaert said.