The last time Bruce Boudreau was fired, he lasted all of three days on the unemployment line.
If the self-proclaimed hockey lifer lasts three days this time, it’ll be two days too many.
Someone was getting fired after that Game 7 in Anaheim.
If not Boudreau, maybe Ducks GM Bob Murray, the architect of a forward core whose championship window is creaking shut.
Who knows? Perhaps Nashville GM David Poile would’ve been scarified. He’s had pressures of his own, letting college stud Jimmy Vesey slip from his grasp, seemingly pushing all-in with the Seth Jones–Ryan Johansen blockbuster, and answering to a fan base that misses Barry Trotz. Poile half-joked on Hockey Central that he was just happy to be at the last Board of Governors meeting.
No matter that Boudreau’s Anaheim Ducks fired 17 more shots than the Nashville Predators that night, that Anaheim won the special teams battle, stole more face-offs, threw more hits and committed fewer penalties. No matter that the Ducks had clawed back from an 0-2 series deficit against one of the league’s most well-rounded teams and hottest netminders.
The Predators scored one more than the home team, and Boudreau’s record in Game 7s fell to an unfathomable 1-7, puck possession be damned.
And you can’t fire Corey Perry, even if the shooter failed to find the back of the net all series. Perry earns a team-high $8.65 million per year and was a team-worst minus-7 in the series.
So hockey is cruel and Boudreau takes the fall for the Anaheim Ducks, a team that Jonathan Toews said was the Blackhawks’ greatest barrier en route to the 2015 Stanley Cup and then got its roster jumbled in the off-season.
Skip back to the fall, when the Ducks forgot to play this game and my editor asked me to prepare a “Bruce Boudreau fired” draft in WordPress that would prove precisely six months premature, but useful eventually.
It had been 79 years since the NHL had seen an offence as futile through the first 10 games of a season as the 2015-16 Ducks’. Anaheim had been shut out in half of those 10 games and squatted, shockingly, in last place.
Boudreau, red-faced, described “a dark cloud” over his team. And we always knew he would be the scapegoat.
“I came close do doing a lot of things,” Murray said of those black days. No doubt firing the affable “Gabby” was one of them.
Yet Murray stuck by his coach, and was applauded for it. If only temporarily, Murray had reversed a trend. Boston showed patience amidst disappointment, too.
The goals, they came. Anaheim finished with the No. 1 power play and No. 1 penalty kill in the NHL. The coach takes heat for juggling goaltenders John Gibson and Frederik Andersen, but he juggled them all the way to the William Jennings Trophy.
Anaheim had gone from Cup favourite to imploding disaster to Cup favourite again. And Boudreau did it with a bulging cumulonimbus hanging over him the whole while.
Now, this viewer disagreed with Boudreau’s decision to start rookie John Gibson (.900 save percentage this post-season) over Frederik Andersen (.947) in games 1 and 2 of the Nashville series, but we don’t know if Andersen was still dealing with lingering concussion symptoms.
Front office moves are intended to improve the team. Will Anaheim find a better coach than the one they “relieved” Friday? Doubtful.
Eight times Boudreau has been given the reins for a full NHL season. Eight times he’s led that team to a divisional title. The fastest coach to 400 wins will leave Disneyland with a record of 208-104-40 and, we presume, voicemails from Minnesota’s Chuck Fletcher and Ottawa’s Pierre Dorion.
Hey, Marc Bergevin. Would you like a mulligan on that Michel Therrien 2016-17 guarantee?
Anaheim assistant coaches Trent Yawney (whom Cam Fowler credits fully for the Ducks’ incredible PK) and Paul MacLean (the 2013 Jack Adams Award winner, with Ottawa) surely leap to Murray’s list of top candidates. Former NHL bench bosses Marc Crawford, Guy Boucher, Ron Wilson, Mike Yeo and Randy Carlyle (whom Boudreau replaced in California, ironically) are eager to be get back into the club.
Of the entire crop, Boudreau most deserves to hold one of the league’s 30 head coaching gigs. And, thanks to Mike Babcock, the asking price for men proven capable of doing the job has gone up.
“This isn’t pointing a gun at Bruce’s head. Let’s make that perfectly clear,” Murray said at his press conference, smoke still in the air. “But you got to start somewhere.”
Or restart somewhere.
Boudreau is not to blame for this. The skies will clear, the lifer will be back.
And if the good coach wins the Jack Adams this June, it’ll be Murray whose face turns red.
