The Capitals fired head coach Bruce Boudreau on Monday morning less than two months into a season of high expectations that started strong only to fall apart with astonishing speed in November.
Boudreau, who was hired as the interim coach on Nov. 22, 2007 and led his team to the Stanley Cup playoffs four times, will be replaced by Dale Hunter, a legendary figure in the franchise’s history who played 12 years for the Caps between 1987 and 1999 and captained the team to its only Stanley Cup finals appearance.
Washington began the season with a 7-0 record, but that success quickly evaporated. The Caps are 5-9-1 over their last 15 games and – more troubling – have been blown out three times in the past week alone. Two of those losses – 7-1 at Toronto on Nov. 19 and 5-1 at Buffalo on Saturday – were to short-handed teams missing a combined 16 starters.
“The reason for the change was we weren’t winning, obviously, and this wasn’t a slump,” Washington general manager George McPhee said. “You can ride out slumps. This was simply a case of the players were no longer responding to Bruce. When you see that, as much as you don’t want to make a change, you have to make a change.”
Boudreau’s teams were a combined 201-88-40 record under his watch and each of the past two seasons finished with the most standings points in the Eastern Conference. He was named the Jack Adams Award winner as NHL coach of the year after taking over for Glen Hanlon early in the 2007-08 season, lifting Washington from the worst record in the NHL the day he accepted the job to its first playoff appearance in five years. But repeated postseason failures, including a stunning upset to No. 8 seed Montreal in the first round of the 2009-10 playoffs, put Boudreau under immense pressure despite his sparkling regular-season record.
Last spring the Caps won their first-round series, but were swept 4-0 by Southeast Division rival Tampa Bay in the second round. For all of their success, including four consecutive division titles, Boudreau’s teams managed just two Stanley Cup series wins in four years – both against the New York Rangers – and never made it beyond the second round.
Boudreau kept his job after the Lightning debacle. But management wanted him to set a harder tone with players this season. Boudreau scratched second-year forward Marcus Johansson – a player expected to anchor the team’s second line – from the season opener against Carolina on Oct. 8 following a disappointing training camp. Johansson was far from the only player held to that standard.
Boudreau said all summer that veteran goalie Tomas Vokoun, signed to a team-friendly $1.5 million contract on July 1, had earned the right to be his No. 1 goalie. Yet Vokoun, too, did not start the season opener after a mediocre training camp. Boudreau primarily played veteran winger Mike Knuble, a top-line player the previous two years, on the fourth line following an Oct. 22 win over Detroit that pushed the Caps to a 7-0 record.
Late in a Nov. 1 game against Anaheim at Verizon Center, Boudreau kept star winger Alex Ovechkin on the bench with his team down a goal. Instead, the third line of Brooks Laich, Jason Chimera, Joel Ward and extra attacker Nicklas Backstrom scored the tying goal in a game Washington won in overtime. Television cameras caught Ovechkin mouthing what appeared to be an obscenity at his coach when informed he was staying on the bench. Veteran center Jeff Halpern was a healthy scratch that night.
Boudreau benched right wing Alex Semin for the final period of a game Nov. 11 at New Jersey thanks in large part to a rash of frustrating penalties. When they continued the next week, Semin was scratched from a game Nov. 21 against the Phoenix Coyotes. It was the first time Semin, 27, had been a healthy scratch since his rookie season in 2003-04. Ward missed a team meeting last week and he, too, was made a healthy scratch for a game last Wednesday against Winnipeg.
Also, a 5-2 loss to Dallas at home on Nov. 8 led to a bag skate at practice the following day. Boudreau put his players through a grueling 75-minute practice that included two-on-two “battle” drills rarely used during the grind of an 82-game regular season.
None of that extra discipline, however, prevented Washington’s fall in the standings. The players tried to take matters into their own hands with their own meeting – without coaches present – on Nov. 18 during an off day in Toronto. The following night they were blasted 7-1 anyway by a Maple Leafs team missing seven regulars.
“Bruce emptied the tank and he’s pushed every button he could,” McPhee said. “And if it worked for a while it’s not working now. And now we’ll bring in another good coach and let him push the buttons that he wants to push and coach the way he wants to coach and see if we can these guys playing the way they’re capable of playing.”
Boudreau had been with the organization since the start of the 2005-06 season. He coached Washington’s AHL affiliate, the Hershey Bears, to two Calder Cup finals appearances, winning the title in 2006 and losing in 2007. That gave Boudreau a working relationship with many of his current players, including forward Laich and defensemen Mike Green and Jeff Schultz.
Boudreau coached nine years in the AHL and spent the majority of his playing career in that league, where he is enshrined in its Hall of Fame. He remains one of the AHL’s all-time leading scorers, ranking 16th all-time in goals (316), 12th in assists (483) and 11th in points (799). But Boudreau also spent parts of eight NHL seasons with his hometown Maple Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks. In 141 career NHL games he totaled 28 goals, 42 assists and 70 points.
Boudreau coached Washington to the Presidents’ Trophy in 2009-10 after it led the NHL in standings points that season. That team set the franchise record for wins (54) and points (121) and was the league’s highest-scoring team (3.82 goals per game). Only Bryan Murray has more wins (343) amongst Caps coaches than Boudreau’s 201. But his points percentage (.672) is by far the best in team history and second among NHL coaches with at least 200 games. Only San Jose’s Todd McLellan (.680) is better.
Assistant coaches Dean Evason and Bob Woods have been retained. Evason, 47, has been with the Caps since the start of the 2005-06 season. Woods, 43, spent two years as the head coach at Hershey, succeeding Boudreau, and led the Bears to a Calder Cup championship in 2009. He has been on the NHL staff since the start of the 2009-10 season.
Hunter, 51, has spent the last 11 seasons as co-owner and head coach of the London Knights, a junior hockey team in the Ontario Hockey League. There he coached current Caps defensemen John Carlson and Dennis Wideman when they were teenagers and worked with current NHL stars Rick Nash, Corey Perry, Patrick Kane and John Tavares.
But he has no coaching experience at the NHL level. Hunter co-owns the Knights with his brother, Mark, who is also the team’s general manager. McPhee downplayed that lack of NHL experience, saying Hunter has the highest points percentage of any coach with 200 games in OHL history – .690 going into Sunday’s play. McPhee also said he’d been speaking with Hunter for about a week to gauge his interest in making the leap back to the NHL.
Hunter, who served as Washington’s captain from 1994 until he retired after the 1999 season, still leads the franchise is penalty minutes (2,003) and ranks second in games played (872) and third in assists (556). He is one of just four players in the Caps’ 37-season history to have his uniform number (No. 32) retired.
Hunter was one of the NHL’s most notorious players during a 19-year career that included six-and-a-half seasons with the Quebec Nordiques and a 12-game stint with the Colorado Avalanche in his final year. At just 5-foot-10, 200 pounds, Hunter played with a ferociousness that endeared him to Washington fans, but often took him across the line of fair play. He was suspended 21 games to start the 1993-94 season following a vicious hit on New York Islanders star forward Pierre Turgeon, who had just scored what proved to be the clinching goal in Gamer 6 of a first-round Stanley Cup playoff series win over the Caps the previous spring.
But Hunter was a popular figure with teammates and had an innate ability to come through when it mattered most for his team. Hunter played in 100 career playoff games with Washington and still holds the team record for postseason points (72). His series-clinching goal against the Philadelphia Flyers in overtime of Game 7 of a 1988 first-round Stanley Cup playoff series remains one of the franchise’s iconic moments. The Caps had trailed in that series 3 games to 1 and in that game 3-0 entering the third period.
“I think this team is capable of being a very good team and competing for a cup,” McPhee said. “That hasn’t changed. I’m certainly disappointed with the way we’ve played lately but we still have a winning record and it’s time to start getting more wins.”
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