After the Nashville Predators eliminated the Anaheim Ducks from the playoffs, the Ducks fired head coach Bruce Boudreau. It took less than two weeks for the 61-year-old to find work, as the Minnesota Wild stepped up and offered Boudreau $2.76 million per year to coach the Wild for the next four seasons.
This is a coaching move that will instantly improve the Minnesota Wild.
Wherever Boudreau has gone as a head coach, winning has followed, to an absurd extent. In four and a half seasons with the Washington Capitals, Boudreau won four division titles and the Capitals topped the 100 point plateau three times.
With the Anaheim Ducks, Boudreau coached five seasons, again winning four division titles and finishing with over 100 points. The Ducks also won the President’s Trophy as the league’s best regular season team in 2013-14.
Out of coaches who have been behind the bench for at least 100 games, Boudreau ranks second in terms of points percentage during the regular season, ahead of established winners such as Mike Babcock and Joel Quenneville.
That kind of success is hard to ignore, especially when Boudreau has been so successful in the salary cap era, where the league is supposed to have parity.
The impressive resume that the savvy bench boss can boast isn’t just related to team strength, too. There’s a strong case to be made that Boudreau provides a considerable boost to the teams that he coaches, whether it be because of his system, because of his presence in the room, or because of his uncanny ability to make needed adjustments.
Consider the Washington Capitals, the first team that fully featured Boudreau at the helm. Looking at a 50-game rolling average of the team’s score adjusted Corsi For percentage, the impact that Boudreau had on the roster is easily detectable.
Pre-Boudreau, the Captials were consistently below 50 percent of possession. They remained over 50 percent for the entirety of his tenure, then immediately fell back to below 50 percent after he was fired. The team has only recently recovered, and gotten themselves back up over 50 percent, but still not at the levels that they reached while playing under Boudreau.
It’s pretty obvious that whatever system the Capitals were running under the 61-year-old were working. The puck possession dominance is obvious, and it disappears almost as soon as he leaves. There were some other factors involved (mainly that the coaches after Boudreau were terrible), but it’s still clear that there is a discernible boost in team performance related to Boudreau.
We can see the same trend with the Anaheim Ducks. The Ducks won the 2007 Stanley Cup when their team was an elite puck possession squad, but lost a lot of talent in the following years. From 2009-2011, the Ducks struggled to control play, and were consistently out-shot.
Enter Bruce Boudreau, and the story changes. Anaheim’s Corsi For percentage hovers around 50 percent from 2011-2015, and then jumps up to around 53 percent for the 2015-2016 season.
Again, we can a noticeable impact directly related to Boudreau’s presence behind the bench.
This most recent season is particularly noteworthy, given the amount of rotten luck the Ducks had to fight through for most of the season. At the beginning of the year, Anaheim simply could not find the back of the net. A hysterically low shooting percentage kept them from winning games, but the Ducks adjusted; they switched to a heavy neutral zone trap, and tried to suffocate their opponents defensively.
Calgary Flames defenseman Mark Giordano called it “the biggest trap we’ve seen all year”, and Boudreau himself noted that the team made a more conscious effort to play defense.
“Hey, you know what? We might not average more than a goal and a half a game.’ But if we want to win, that means we have to limit the teams to one goal a game and not using the crutch of bad luck or puck luck or whatever you want to call it, because that might never end. So the coaches took it upon themselves to say, ‘OK, let’s just focus totally on defense.’ If things went better that way, the confidence would allow them to score more. And they did.”
Boudreau’s adjustments led to puck possession dominance that allowed the Ducks to win the Pacific Division despite finishing the year with a 5-on-5 PDO below 100. That is some incredible coaching, and a huge reason why Today’s Slapshot’s Carolyn Wilke labeled Boudreau as the obvious selection for the Jack Adams Award.
Bruce Boudreau has a 409-192-80 record as an NHL coach. In every full season he’s been the head coach of a team, that team has won its division. There is a notable impact on puck possession metrics every time Bourdreau steps behind the bench.
He’s not a miracle worker, but there’s no denying that Boudreau is one of the best coaches in the league.
The Minnesota Wild struggled in 2015-16, finishing the year in the bottom 10 of the league in terms of puck possession metrics, barely qualifying for the playoffs, and then exiting in the first round. They have plenty of quality pieces on the roster, but aren’t exactly talented enough to compete with the elite teams in the Central.
Don’t expect the Wild to immediately jump to the top of the Central Division, but expect them to be a better puck possession team, and to win more games. This is what Boudreau does — everywhere he goes, he makes his teams better. General manager Chuck Fletcher did himself a huge favor when he snatched up the savvy bench boss, and his team will benefit because of it.
Statistics and charts courtesy of war-on-ice.com and corsica.hockey. All stats at 5 on 5 and score adjusted unless otherwise mentioned.
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