A year after Barry Trotz was bloodied after getting hit in the head with a puck, former Caps coach Bruce Boudreau experienced the same bad luck during the Minnesota Wild’s 4-2 win over the Nashville Predators.
With 5:44 left in the third period, a puck deflected onto the Wild’s bench and struck Boudreau on the left side of his temple. Boudreau would bleed and get helped to the locker room by the team’s trainer.
This Wednesday, it will be 10 years to the day since the Washington Capitals named Bruce Boudreau, then helming their AHL team, interim head coach on November 22, 2007.
By Chris Gordon 6 years ago
Despite being a decade removed from coaching the Hershey Bears, former bench boss Bruce Boudreau is still enamored with the team and the area that helped make him a star.
Tuesday night at Giant Center, Boudreau was shown on the jumbotron during Game Six of the Hershey Bears’ second-round series against the Providence Bruins. Boudreau, wearing a Bears home jersey, had a special message for his old team.
“We were just unsuccessful,” Minnesota Wild defenseman Ryan Suter said to 1500 ESPN’s Judd Zulgad after their team’s 5-4 overtime loss to the Capitals. “We designed our PK to defend that.”
The that Suter is referring to is Caps superstar Alex Ovechkin who dogged the Wild for three power-play goals. Former Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau specifically tailored the team’s penalty kill to take away Ovechkin. Instead, the team left Ovechkin alone on Ovechkin Island, sipping on piña coladas.
The Russian tallied his 17th career hat trick, but it was Ovechkin’s first ever all-power-play goal hatty. But what went so wrong?
After the mumps overtook nearly a quarter of the Vancouver Canucks roster, the Minnesota Wild announced on Monday that forwards Jason Pominville and Zach Parise were diagnosed with the virus.
Bruce Boudreau met with the Minnesota media on Tuesday to discuss his teams status while Pominville and Parise are in isolation. The presser turned into a quote factory from Boudreau.
By Cara Bahniuk 7 years ago
Former Capitals Head Coach Bruce Boudreau was a second-round draft pick by the Leafs, a Calder Cup-winning head coach in the AHL, and a successful bench boss in the NHL. Yet he might be best known for a 15-second cameo he made in the cult-classic movie Slap Shot.
Next Wednesday, the NHL will debut a documentary entitled Slap Shot at 40, which features interviews on the film’s enduring popularity. Boudreau will be a big part of that special along with the Hanson Brothers, Bob Costas, Ned Dowd, Adam Oates, Mike Gartner, and many others.
Wherever Bruce Boudreau goes, talk of winning the Stanley Cup follows. Since the portly bench boss oversaw the Washington Capitals’ transformation from a sad franchise to a thrilling team that is of the league’s perennial threats, Boudreau has been a coveted head coach for teams looking to turn things around. He has never been out of a job long.
On Sunday night, Boudreau returned to Anaheim for the first time after spending parts of six seasons coaching the Ducks. He took the Ducks to the playoffs five times, once within one win of the Stanley Cup Final. But after his fourth straight Game 7 loss on April 28 of last year, he was fired for the second time in his career, only to be replaced Randy Carlyle, the man whose job he took over years earlier. One week later, Boudreau was scooped up by the Minnesota Wild.
By Chris Gordon 7 years ago
Photo: Justin K. Aller
Bruce Boudreau began the 2011-12 season with his team as a favorite to win the Stanley Cup. In his last two seasons, he followed up a Presidents’ Trophy with an Eastern Conference regular-season title. Now, he had seven straight wins to start the year. A little over a month later, Boudreau, the fastest coach in NHL history to 200 wins, was gone. The man who resurrected hockey in Washington was replaced by two coaches who slowly bled the greatness out of the Capitals.
Just under four years later, Boudreau has found himself in a similar spot. Now the coach of the Anaheim Ducks, he had led his team to within one game of the Stanley Cup Finals the year before. But the start of the 2015-16 season was a catastrophe. His team scored 10 goals in the entire month of October. They finished the month with a single victory. Boudreau didn’t have any answers.
“I don’t know,” he said after his team threw away another game on October 27. “I’m sort of at a loss right now.”
By Chris Gordon 7 years ago
Photo: Marianne Helm
Last week, Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin slept through practice. Barry Trotz punished the forward by scratching him for that night’s game against the San Jose Sharks.
“It was suck,” Ovechkin said to the media at the time.
According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, this isn’t the first time in recent history that a Capital has missed practice.
Saturday night, I watched in horror as the Anaheim Ducks lost in game seven to the Chicago Blackhawks 5-3. I, the sadistic Caps fan that I am, was rooting for Bruce Boudreau to make it to the Stanley Cup Finals because of how much he did for this area while he coached Washington and Hershey. Instead Bruce’s team collapsed in another big game. He was so tantalizingly close.
Pro Hockey Talk described Bruce’s futility in game sevens, and it’s pretty much the most depressing thing you’ll ever read.
