Patrick Roy's sudden departure caught the Colorado Avalanche completely by surprise.
“He didn’t tell anybody," Matt Duchene told Yahoo Sports' Greg Wyshynski at the World Cup of Hockey on Monday.
"Nobody knew until he announced it. But he’s not going to burden anybody with that secret before he announces it. I think it was pretty shocking for all of us, but you close that chapter and you move on.”
Related - Duchene denies rift with Roy: 'There (were) never any problems'
"It caught us off guard," goaltender Semyon Varlamov said. "We knew he had just signed a new deal for two more years, and then he resigned a couple of weeks later. I’m not going to lie. Patrick has been very helpful to me and to the whole team. I was in a good spot.”
Roy resigned in August after three seasons as Avalanche head coach and vice-president of hockey operations, citing philosophical differences between he and the organization and claiming he didn't "have a say in the decisions that impact the team's performance."
Colorado won the Central Division title in Roy's first season, after which he received the Jack Adams Award as the league's top coach. However, the Avalanche failed to make the playoffs in the two subsequent campaigns.
Captain Gabriel Landeskog acknowledged that the players deserve some of the blame for Roy's exit.
“A big part of the responsibly of us missing the playoffs for two years in a row has to be on the players,” Landeskog said. “Patrick had his strategy on how he wanted to lead the team, and he did it 100 percent. But at some point, the players have to take some responsibility and unfortunately Patrick felt he had to step down and move on. We feel like that a part of that is on us."
The Avalanche named Jared Bednar the club's new head coach in late August, two weeks after Roy's resignation and mere weeks before the start of training camp.
"How late it was in the summer … I don’t think Patty did that to make it difficult on the Avs to hire a new coach,” defenseman Erik Johnson said.
“I think he took his time with his decision. Had he stayed, he would have made it worse than him leaving the way he did. So you have to respect that decision, even if it was made close to camp.”
Roy said in April that he had no plans to vacate the bench for the 2016-17 season, but wrote in his farewell statement that he "thought long and hard over the course of the summer" about how he could improve the team.
Bednar became the first Avalanche head coach with no previous ties to the organization.
