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Exclusive: Former Wild coach Bruce Boudreau opens up about his firing
Michael Russo Feb 17, 2020 467
DELLWOOD, Minn. — Bruce Boudreau went out in public for the first time Sunday afternoon.
Two days after losing his job with the Wild, after sequestering himself inside his Woodbury house for 51 hours, Boudreau walked into the private Tamarack Room at Dellwood Country Club with his wife of nearly 25 years, Crystal, to sit down with The Athletic for his first interview since the blindsiding news was delivered to him Friday morning.
The Boudreaus sat down at a corner table next to a crackling fireplace and in front of a window that faced the gorgeous, snow-covered first tee box and a glassy outdoor ice rink that reminded Boudreau of the one he skated on as a kid.
“I think small ice like that is how children can best develop puck skills,” the former junior star said.
In the adjacent dining room, there was a large family enjoying Sunday brunch, and they immediately spotted the former Wild coach and turned their heads with astonished gazes.
“For two days I haven’t shown my face because I don’t want a pity party,” Boudreau said during the sitdown over lunch. “Everybody knows me, so it’d be like, ‘Poor you.’”
But with his eyes subtly becoming wet, Boudreau, still trying to accept and digest the decision made by Wild general manager Bill Guerin, said, “It’s tough.”
It was a normal Friday morning.
Boudreau set his alarm for just after 6 a.m. and arrived first at the Wild’s practice facility in St. Paul like he did every day at 7 o’clock.
The Wild had surrendered a two-goal, third-period lead to the New York Rangers before losing in a shootout the night before. Boudreau held his normal coaches meeting at 8:45 with assistants Dean Evason, Bob Woods and Darby Hendrickson, goalie coach Bob Mason and video coach Jonas Plumb.
They broke down video, came up with a practice plan, pre-scouted the San Jose Sharks and decided on a lineup for Saturday’s game before Boudreau left the coach’s room to return to his office. It was 9:30 a.m.
“It was funny because Bill came in and he shut the door, and as soon as he shut the door, I knew,” Boudreau said. “You just know, right? And he says, ‘I’m going to make a change,’ and I instantly said, ‘Are you firing me?!’ — just like that.
“And he goes, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you ****ing kidding me?’”
Guerin said it was something he was thinking about for awhile and began to praise Boudreau for the type of coach and person he was, but Boudreau was in no mood to hear any of that. Boudreau uttered a few choice words and walked out of the room. He found a private area to calm himself down, then went into the coaches’ room.
“I said, ‘Boys, it’s been fun working with you. I just got fired,’” Boudreau said. “Dean wasn’t in there because Bill pulled him into his office to let him know he would be the interim. Then, I went and told Jonas I was fired, told Whitey (director of team operations Andrew Heydt), gave him a hug with tears in my eyes and I left.”
Boudreau has coached 10 hockey teams since 1990-91, three in the NHL, so he’s been fired plenty of times.
“But it doesn’t get easier — ever,” Boudreau said.
Over the two hours Boudreau spent with The Athletic Sunday, as broken up as he still is over losing his job, he talked about how much he enjoyed coaching the Wild and their players and how great it was to work for people like Guerin, former GM Chuck Fletcher and owner Craig Leipold.
He and his wife spoke often about how they fell in love with the people of Minnesota and how much they adored establishing roots in the state.
And Boudreau, who was 158-110-35 in three-plus seasons with the Wild and ranks 22nd in NHL history with 567 regular-season wins and third with a .635 points percentage, made it clear how much he hopes to coach again.
“If I could coach yesterday, I’d do it,” Boudreau said. “I get mad, and instead of feeling sorry for myself, I want to get right back into it. In the past, I’ve gotten lucky that I got back into it right away. When I came here four years ago, I hoped this was my last job. I hoped to be here 10 years. It didn’t work out that way, but I know I can still coach.”
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When a coach or GM is fired, he usually disappears out of the public eye for some time. Fans and the media don’t usually get to see the heavy toll it takes on the person. For instance, when Mike Yeo was fired by the Wild, he escaped off the beaten path to northern Minnesota and Canada to go ice fishing.
“But we don’t have a second home,” Crystal said.
“We don’t have a cottage to get away to,” Bruce said.
So, since he’s hanging around, Boudreau was gracious enough Sunday afternoon to draw back that curtain on the human side of being fired.
After leaving the Wild’s practice facility Friday, Boudreau called his wife to inform her of the bad news. Crystal immediately called Boudreau’s three children from his first marriage, Andy, Ben and Kasey, and their 21-year-old son, Brady.
The next call from Crystal was to Bruce’s 86-year-old mother, Theresa.
“Yeah, I couldn’t talk to my mum,” Boudreau said. “I would have broke down.”
It’s a crazy profession hockey coaches lead.
Sure, they’re handsomely paid, but you are hired knowing full well that someday, probably relatively soon, you’ll be fired unceremoniously.
That first day, in front of a crisp, colorful backdrop, is always filled with excitement and joy as you’re presented with a brand-new baseball cap and team jersey from the general manager. In Boudreau’s case in Minnesota, that was three GMs ago — Fletcher.
You talk about how you expect to turn your new club into a perennial contender and you smile widely as you express your dream of someday winning a Stanley Cup. You say all of this to a large audience of reporters and team employees and other onlookers knowing all along that in two, three, 3 ½ years you’re probably going to be storming out of some office incensed, devastated and cursing at the sky.
Heck, look simply at this bloody year in the NHL where eight coaches have been fired or resigned, including 2018, 2017 and 2016 Stanley Cup runner-up coaches Gerard Gallant, Peter Laviolette and Pete DeBoer.
There’s no easy way to fire a coach.
Guerin agonized over the decision for a few weeks, discussed it for some time with Leipold and finally called Leipold into his office around 9 a.m. Friday to explain his reasoning and get the final go-ahead before driving a couple blocks from Wild headquarters to TRIA Rink.
“In Anaheim, two days after the season, Bob (Murray) called me to meet him in his office at 9 a.m. So you know,” Boudreau said. “At 8:59, I was waiting. At 9 o’clock I went in. At 9:01, I was out.
“With George (McPhee) in Washington, I was on my way to work, he phoned and said, ‘Can you come by the house?’ What he didn’t realize is I was five minutes away. So when I got there, he answered the door in his pajamas. He said, ‘Can you wait in my office? I’ll be right down.’ He put a suit on, and then he told me. And with George, it was different. He fired me, but then he hugged me and he said, ‘I’m going to miss you.’ There was a genuine connection there, which is why I still really like him.”
It’s reminiscent of how Fletcher fired Yeo in Minnesota. After delivering Yeo the bruising news after a loss to Boston, Fletcher and Yeo cried over a beer in Yeo’s office.
Boudreau, incidentally, never gave Guerin — who by all accounts really does like Boudreau — a chance to hug him or cry with him.
Boudreau was out the door in a huff and mostly disappointed that he didn’t get a chance to finish what he strived to do when he arrived in the Twin Cities in April 2016.
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“We’re addicts. We love this sport. We love this profession. Coaching, teaching, winning,” Boudreau said on this chilly, sunny Sunday, talking passionately about how he craves another crack behind an NHL bench. “The thrill of winning is a real drug and wanting to compete. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
“She knows,” Boudreau said, looking at Crystal. “That’s why we don’t play any games anymore … because I cheat at them all.”
“Yeah, he cheats a lot,” Crystal agreed.
“I just want to win. It’s the drug of winning that has driven me forever,” Boudreau said.
In the two days since being let go, Boudreau’s emotions have run the natural gamut.
His mood varies from anger to down-in-the-dumps to embarrassed to “bored already” to fretting about whether his coaching career has come to an end.
He’s 65, and even though Calgary, Dallas, San Jose, New Jersey, Seattle and undoubtedly more teams will be looking for coaches this offseason, he hopes owners and GMs don’t feel he’s too old.
“I don’t feel old. I feel young,” Boudreau said. “It’s not like you’re old and you don’t have energy. I’m the first one at work every day, I go in every day on off-days, I’m doing this all the time, thinking hockey all the time, so I feel very young. And anytime you go to a new job, you’re rejuvenated and you work harder.”
Boudreau entered this season as a lame-duck coach.
In the final year of a four-year contract with the Wild unwilling to entertain an extension last offseason, Boudreau and his wife were convinced he’d be fired at some point, whether that was during the season or right after, because “all GMs want their own coach. And I understood that,” Boudreau said.
Throughout the season, Boudreau’s three oldest children, including Ben, who coaches the ECHL Fort Wayne Komets, would call and occasionally ask if he was doing OK amidst the pressure of winning and losing without the security of time left on his contract.
“And I would always say, ‘I’m OK if it happens,’ but when it (happened), I just was reminded, you’re never OK,” Boudreau said. “As much as this is the nature of this business, nobody wants to hear the words. I’d be throwing on the brave front whenever my daughter or other kids would call me and ask if I was nervous. I’d say, ‘Hey, don’t worry about me. If this goes down, I’ll be OK. I understand the game, I understand the business.’
“But when it does go down, it’s funny … but you’re not OK. So that’s why I probably reacted like that with Billy.”
But Boudreau was also genuinely caught off guard.
“I’ll tell you what, I’m pretty sharp when it comes to these things,” Boudreau said, laughing. “I may not be sharp in a lot of things, but with firings, I usually know. This one I didn’t see coming. In Washington, they asked us to redo the lease on our house and even though I had two years left on my contract, I told Crystal to only do one year because, ‘I’m not going to make it through this year. They’re ready to get rid of me.’
“The same thing with our home in Anaheim. We were renting, and the guy was great. He said, ‘We’ll just go month-to-month.’”
But this one?
The Wild were 7-3-1 in their past 11, getting closer to a playoff spot and Boudreau’s guard was particularly down because he had survived so many other arduous times earlier in the season — like a 3-7 start, a couple real tough losses last month and that 6-1 loss coming out of the bye to Boston.
“We knew (he’d be fired) at the end of the year, but at this point, we thought it would definitely be the end of the year,” Crystal said.
“Yeah,” Bruce said. “I didn’t know if it would at the beginning of the year, Christmastime, the middle of the year or the end of the year. But, I thought we were playing really good and when you’re into the second week of February, I just figured I was safe ‘til the end.”
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Plus, the timing stunk. It was Valentine’s Day. It was two days before the Wild’s Wild About Children gala, which Boudreau loved because he was in his element where he could powwow with hockey fans. It was four days before the Wild’s father-son trip, and Boudreau was excited to bring Brady to Vancouver and to see Andy, who works in Banff, in Edmonton.
And it was 16 games before Boudreau would tie his mentor, Roger Neilson, by becoming the 29th coach in NHL history to work 1,000 regular-season games.
“All year long, whenever my kids wanted to visit me, they’d want to book flights, but never knowing what was going to happen, I told them, ‘You better not,’” Boudreau said. “But my daughter, Kasey, wanted to book a flight for my 1,000th game (which would’ve been March 17 vs. Chicago). I said, ‘OK,’ because I figured March was safe. I mean, we’re in February now and there’s no chance I’ll get fired when we’re fighting for a playoff spot after coming back from however many points back.
“So, she books the flight, and I get fired.”
Said Crystal, “We’ll take her and the kids to Disney instead.”
In hindsight, Boudreau said there were recent signs he was on unsteady ground.
For instance, Sunday night was the Wild About Children event, and just like the Boudreaus did in Washington and Anaheim, they auction off two or three eight-person dinners for hockey fans to attend at their home in the offseason.
Crystal cooks. Bruce does what he does best — gabs.
In the past, both in Minnesota and previous stops, the dinners have been purchased for tens of thousands of dollars.
“This year, we were asked not to do it, which pretty well tells you they don’t expect you to be here in the summer,” Boudreau said, chuckling.
And, from a hockey perspective, it just felt to him that Guerin had been distant with him lately and not including him in hockey decisions. Guerin was also starting to voice his displeasure after losses with some of Boudreau’s deployment of players and lineup decisions and Boudreau said “it’s quite possible” the decreased ice time amidst the development of players like Kevin Fiala, Joel Eriksson Ek, Luke Kunin and Jordan Greenway were rubbing veterans the wrong way.
“But I dismissed all that as nothing out of the ordinary,” Boudreau said. “Maybe that was my naivety.”
Boudreau was asked if it was a hard existence every day waking up knowing that he was probably closer to the finish line in Minnesota.
“If I wanted to be dramatic, I’d say, ‘Yes,’” Boudreau said. “But I got up every day and went to work and didn’t think it was hanging over my head until maybe at night time when you’d go home and think. But I set my alarm every morning at the same time, got to work at the same time and never acted like it was my last year.”
Plain and simple, the Wild are a flawed team.
They don’t have a true star. They are weak at the center position. They’ve gotten sub-par goaltending.
Yet after surviving the slow start to this season and a crazy schedule that saw them play 20 of their first 30 games on the road, after starting to repair their dismal special teams lately, Boudreau felt things were trending in the right direction. It sure seemed like a testament to his coaching that they were even flirting with a playoff spot at the time of his dismissal.
Yet, despite these obvious weaknesses, Boudreau, at least outwardly, seemed optimistic about the team’s chances.
“My job is always to just make it work,” Boudreau said. “It’s funny, I remember that first press conference when I got hired by Chuck, you asked me, ‘After having Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom and Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry, do you think you can win without a star player?’ I said, ‘Yes, we can win.’
“My thinking always all summer long last summer, if (Matt) Dumba comes in and returns to form, if Mikko (Koivu’s) healthy, if Ek, Kunin, Greener improve, if Zach (Parise) can stay in that 25- to 30-goal form, if Jason (Zucker) can get back to 30, if (Eric) Staal and (Devan Dubnyk) can bounce back after off years, if (Fiala) keeps growing, if (Ryan) Suter can get back to being the Ryan Suter after that terrible injury two years ago, we can surprise people.
“When I did that SiriusXM interview and I was telling Boomer (Gordon), ‘You’re wrong. We’re going to be there,’ I wasn’t just blowing smoke. I really believed it. I was just thinking real positive thoughts. My main worry was the schedule hampering us, not the players. I don’t want to act like I’m a friggin’ superstar coach, but I’ve never had a problem getting players to win.
“So I came into this season confident and tried not to worry about if we had this and that compared to other teams.”
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The hockey world is a tight one, and when word got out Friday morning that Boudreau was fired, he was inundated with calls and texts.
On Friday, Boudreau said he didn’t get off the phone for 15 hours. On Saturday, it was probably 12 hours. On Sunday, it was the well-wishers who wanted to give him a couple days of peace.
“It’s amazing the conversations,” Boudreau said. “The hockey world is so good.”
He has heard from everybody, even Yeo, the now-Philadelphia Flyers assistant, who he doesn’t know well, and even folks like Brian Burke.
“Brian Burke has phoned me three times to check up on me,” Boudreau said. “And I don’t even know Brian Burke.”
The first call Boudreau received?
Fletcher, the person who hired him in Minnesota.
“I didn’t make it through that phone call (without crying),” Boudreau said, his eyes welling up. “He is class from top to bottom.”
One of the afternoon calls he received was from McPhee, the now-president of the Vegas Golden Knights: “I was happy to speak to him because he’s always one to cheer me up and make me feel better.”
“As we were driving here, we just realized it’s been two days,” Crystal interrupted. “It’s like a funeral because you have to reload every time someone calls you, you have to go through the emotions all over again. You have to grieve. You have to be upset. You are angry. It’s just like a funeral, and then it takes time to move on.”
Boudreau loved it in Minnesota. He and his wife purchased a junior expansion team, the Minnesota Blue Ox, and placed them in Coon Rapids.
If Boudreau lands another job next season, they’ll have to sell the majority ownership of the team unless Brady, one of their assistant coaches who also helps Crystal run the team, wants to take over.
“But this is our home,” Boudreau said. “I think more than any other team — I thought I dove in pretty good everywhere I went, but I think I delved in more here. Anything anybody asked I did because I just loved this franchise and these fans. It was always pro-Wild, whether it was doing the State Fair appearances or charitable endeavors or doing radio and TV. The one thing about us, everywhere we’ve gone — Mississippi, San Francisco, Lowell, Manchester, Hershey — we move lock, stock and barrel.
“I mean, we just go, and that’s it. That’s our home. We want to be part of the community.”
Saturday night, when the Wild hosted the Sharks with Evason making his NHL head-coaching debut, Boudreau couldn’t stomach watching.
But he stayed close to his phone because he wanted updates. But none were coming in until a late NHL notification that said the Sharks scored a third-period goal to make it 1-0. Boudreau was stunned the notification appeared, but then it dawned on him, the reason he didn’t know Wild notifications appear on his phone is because he’s usually coaching their games at the time. As he contemplated this fact, another notification popped up that said the Wild lost, 2-0.
“I was like, ‘Woah.’ I was surprised,” Boudreau said.
Asked if he’ll remove Wild game notifications off his phone, Boudreau laughed.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll get Crystal to do it at some point. That’s the thing. I loved this place. But, as pissed as I was at Billy at that moment, I’ll get over it and I wish him and the Wild all the best.
“I mean, I’ve been really lucky. I was fired in Washington, I got a job the same day. In Anaheim, I was fired two days after the season and I had a job within a week. When it happened in Manchester, I had a job a week later in Hershey.
“So from 2004 basically ‘til now, I’ve never gone a week without working. Now, this timing, there’s no way that anything can happen ‘til maybe the end of the season. So for the first time I’m sitting down not knowing my future.”
And that is scary for Boudreau.
“I don’t like sitting on my ass,” Boudreau said. “I need to work, so hopefully I can do some TV the rest of the season and in the playoffs. Everybody that talks to me knows they have to talk hockey with me because I don’t know anything else.”
Now, Boudreau on NBC or NHL Network or TSN or Sportsnet would be a hoot.
In the meantime, on Saturday, Boudreau solemnly drove to TRIA to clean out his office and “hand in all of our stuff,” from their ID tags to his laptop.
He left a note on the whiteboard for his old players that read in part, “Thanks for everything, boys.”
And then, Boudreau left.
On Tuesday night, when the Wild hit the road for that father-son trip that he’ll so miss, Boudreau will drive down to Xcel Energy Center to clean out that office.
“Yeah,” Boudreau said, his voice shaking, as he got up from the table and stared out the window at that beautiful hockey rink, “getting fired sucks.”
No matter how many times it has happened, no matter how much you know it’ll eventually happen, you’re never, ever fully prepared.
_____________________________
Work like a Captain.
Play like a Pirate.
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