Hi, everyone. It’s your hockey friend, Pat. So, you might have heard that the Anaheim Ducks fired coach Bruce Boudreau on Friday. You probably had one of two reactions.
Let’s discuss the many reasons the Ducks shouldn’t have fired Bruce Boudreau
A quasi-roundtable on the biggest NHL coaching change of the year.
Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports
“This is unsurprising.”
Or, “What the heck are they doing?
We here at SB Nation kind of lean towards the latter sentiment. But there’s no question the hockey-sphere blew up with hot sports opinions about the decision as soon as it came down on Friday.
My hockey partner Mary Clarke and I sat down for a discussion to parse out our thoughts on why the Ducks might have made a huge mistake.
* * *
Pat:
Before we dissect this, let's offer some context. The Anaheim Ducks hired Bruce Boudreau five years ago. Since then, Anaheim has won four straight division titles and been one of the best regular season teams in the NHL. The only problem? They haven't had any real playoff success: two first round exits and no Stanley Cup finals appearances.
On Wednesday, they were eliminated in the first round by the Nashville Predators in a Game 7. On Friday, Boudreau was fired.
Does this seem like a knee-jerk reaction? They, uh, had a pretty damn good year.
Mary:
We don't need to remind you that the Ducks started the season second worst to the Blue Jackets. Anaheim had just one win in the month of October and scored just 10 goals in that span.
Yet, they stuck with Boudreau and it paid off. The experience of a veteran coach helped pull the Ducks out of the bottom of the league and eventually they took home the top spot in the Pacific Division just ahead of the Kings.
Pat:
If you want to look at his numbers, the Ducks arguably just fired a top-five coach in the league. The four straight division titles speak for themselves, he won over 200 games in five years with Anaheim and he’s among the greatest regular season coaches ever:
Best regular season points pct all-time (min 500 games as HC):
— Ian Mendes (@ian_mendes) April 29, 2016
Boudreau - .659
Bowman - .657
Blake - .634
Quenneville - .616
Shero - .612
So they can’t justify this decision based on what he did in the regular season, especially considering the remarkable turnaround this season. This has everything to do with the playoffs and how his Ducks teams failed to meet expectations.
And their expectation was the Stanley Cup. But the last two years, the Ducks ran into the eventual Stanley Cup champions (the Kings and Blackhawks). And they took them to seven games both times! They were literally a few lucky bounces from beating both of them. The man couldn't catch a Game 7 break. Kind of seems like they're jettisoning a premier coach based on some bad luck in win-or-go-home games. Are the Ducks blaming Boudreau for the failures of his players?
Mary:
When it mattered the most, his biggest players weren't there. Corey Perry — the Ducks leading goal scorer in the regular season — was goalless in seven games, with just four assists. Ryan Kesler and Ryan Getzlaf posted four and five points respectively through the series, but it just wasn't enough.
Maybe the only thing that can be hung on Boudreau was giving the first two starts to rookie goaltender John Gibson over the more experienced Frederik Andersen. Gibson allowed six goals on 60 shots in the two opening games, and though he wasn't the only reason the Ducks lost the two home games, he wasn't able to give them key stops when they needed it.
Moreover, as Puck Daddy pointed out so succinctly in an article on Thursday, Boudreau’s Game 7 career has been riddled with unreliable goaltending:
Here are the goalies that played in those games:
Cristobal Huet, Semyon Varlamov (as a rookie, and then as a sophomore), Jonas Hiller, John Gibson (as a rookie, replaced by Hiller), Frederik Anderson (twice).
Varlamov is the only goaltender to break out of that pack to move into a different tier, and that was once he was moved to Colorado. Even then, that lineup boasts none of the game-changing and game-winning abilities of the NHL’s great pantheon of netminders.
By my math...
— Japers' Rink (@JapersRink) April 28, 2016
Boudreau's teams in G7's: 1-8, 55.1 5v5 CF%, 5.1 5v5 Sh%, .867 5v5 Sv%
Boudreau's teams in close-outs: 5-13, 55.6, 5.6, .892
Pat:
And don’t forget that he called out Perry and Getzlaf for their lack of discipline early in the series. He never seemed all that pleased with his best players late in the season and it’s hard to blame him.
You know what the most amazing part of this is? Boudreau could win the Jack Adams Award for best coach. Voting finished when the regular season did, and nobody had a stronger case than Boudreau after that slow start and rapid recovery. We’ve seen coaches win the Jack Adams and get fired the next season, but a coach winning the Jack Adams in the same year he was fired is unheard of.
Let’s circle back to the slow start. Ducks General Manager Bob Murray had every reason to fire Boudreau in November. Instead, he practiced patience, and it paid off. So why suddenly abandon patience now? You’re telling me Murray had faith in Boudreau in one of the lowest moments in recent franchise history but lost all of it when his team got eliminated by one goal in a Game 7 after winning the division title again?
I can’t wrap my brain around that. It screams of a general manager deflecting blame when things go wrong.
Mary:
It’s surprising that General Manager Bob Murray hasn’t been given the axe here as well. Now with a core of over 30s that have only been to the Conference Finals once since their Stanley Cup win in 2007, there’s definitely a bit of blame that can be laid down at the feet of Murray for being unable to put a better supporting cast around their stars.
When he did, it turned into acquiring a pair of bad contracts. Kesler's new six-year, $6.875 million contract extension will see the former Canuck under lock well into his late 30s until 2021-22. Acquiring 34-year-old defenseman Kevin Bieksa added experience to the Ducks blue line last offseason, but he has two years left on his $4 million contract and hasn't hit 20 points in his past two seasons.
It’s the price one has to pay for going for it all, and it did not work for Murray here.
Pat:
That axe might swing soon. There’s a particular scene that constantly plays out throughout pro sports. Team plays well. Team raises expectations to fever pitch. Team keeps missing those expectations. General manager senses unrest and pressure closing in on him. General manager fires coach.
Team falters further. General manager gets fired a year later.
Sound familiar? There’s not enough evidence to lay the blame for Anaheim’s failures at Boudreau’s feet. But now he’s gone, and now there’s only one guy for critics to target when the Ducks don’t improve.
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