BRIGHTON – It was by no means an easy first season for Marco Sturm as a first time NHL head coach behind the bench for the Boston Bruins.
But it was 100 percent the correct person for the job as the Bruins prepare to open their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series against the Buffalo Sabres on the road on Sunday night.
“I think if you don’t enjoy [the Stanley Cup playoffs], you’re in the wrong sport or wrong place,” said Nikita Zadorov, ready for his first postseason while wearing the Black and Gold. “That’s playoff hockey. That’s pressure, that’s atmosphere, intensity, physicality, blood, sweat — you name it.”
Initially, there were plenty of doubters who felt like the 47-year-old former Bruins forward was simply hired by Don Sweeney and Cam Neely because he was a familiar face and part of the good, old Black and Gold network. It was pretty easy to pile on the Bruins front office coming off a season where they dropped to the bottom of the league and a number of less-than-ideal situations with key players were not handled well.
The Jeremy Swayman training camp holdout, with fault on both sides, was a disaster and a season with both the head coach (Jim Montgomery) and the team’s captain (Brad Marchand) serving as lame ducks went poorly for both of them, and for the struggling hockey club.
Bruins management needed to kick-start a full-scale retooling at the NHL trade deadline, and they did that with a number of prudent fire-sale deals that saw them amass first-round picks, bring in much-needed young talent like Fraser Minten and Marat Khusnutdinov, and even sprinkle in useful veteran players like Casey Mittelstadt. And they spent wisely at the July 1 open of NHL free agency, as well as adding leadership and toughness with players like Tanner Jeannot, Sean Kuraly, and Mikey Eyssimont, while trading for second-line sparkplug Viktor Arvidsson.
But one of the biggest, and perhaps most underrated, decisions that the Bruins made was entrusting their revamped roster with a rookie NHL head coach who made his coaching bones in the Los Angeles Kings organization.
“Marco [Sturm], the coaches. Marco was going at this for the first time,” said Sweeney when asked about the Bruins exceeding expectations this season. “We bring in [assistant coach] Steve Spott, who's got a wealth of knowledge working, certainly in the power play department, but he's also worked with high-level coaches, and bringing that experience to Marco's staff was an important step for him as well.
“So how we were navigating was TBD to some degree, and how he was going to handle some of those challenges as well as our players? You know, Charlie [McAvoy] missed a lot of time, Pasta [David Pastrnak] missed time, we lost [players to injuries]…every team does, but obviously the goaltending was a big part of why we got back to where we are. Structure in our team was a work in progress, as well, [while] implementing a new system and players buying into that. I just don't like the fact that you set yourself up to say, ‘well, you know, we exceeded [expectations],’ because I don't want [that], they can pat themselves [on the back], but I want them focused on the fact that we expected to be competitive, and we said at the deadline [that] this team had earned the right to see this thing through, and we felt we were a playoff team.”
And lo and behold, Sturm and the players went out and proved it down the stretch with a playoff-clinching level of play coming out of the Olympic break.
Sturm turned out to be the right guy at exactly the right time for a group of Bruins players that needed a passionate, brutally honest at times, and exacting coach that was going to demand accountability and buy-in from his team, but would also bring back the hard-working, hard-nosed and hard-charging characteristics that always formed the identities of the Bruins teams he’d been on 15 years earlier.
As time wore on, the Bruins players could see that Sturm’s method was going to work in a way things had not a season prior, and that kept them pushing forward during the inevitable times of struggle.
“As a new coach, you always try to win and try to put that new system in place, but you need the players for it,” said Sturm. “They are the ones who have to buy in, and I think those are the ones, maybe [they] were unsure at first, but then they believed in it, and since then they took off.”
It wasn’t always an easy slide back into the playoffs, of course, as there were losing streaks along the way, including a six game losing stretch at the very beginning of the season that tested the new coaching staff’s mettle And a losing streak on home ice headed into the NHL holiday break that made everybody wonder if this Bruins team actually had the playoffs in them this season.
Sturm made adjustments along the way, moving Mason Lohrei out of a high-pressure top 4 defenseman role, sliding Mittelstadt over to the wing, and preaching patience with the hybrid man-to-man approach in the defensive zone. And he ushered in young players like Minten, Khusnutdinov, Jonathan Aspirot, and Alex Steeves, and eventually James Hagens, in a way that showed Sturm is going to be a player who can properly handle young talent at the NHL level.
And it all worked, but there were some confidence-shaking stretches for a head coach going through it at the NHL level for the first time.
“We had a good training camp. We got off to a decent start, and then we [hit a losing streak]. And that's when Marco pulled things even tighter. Knowing that is, there's less practice time, all the things he was going through for the first time. There's more teaching, there's more communication involved at the individual level, and then as a group, and that's where things we came out of that…it’s always extended a little longer you wanted to,” said Sweeney. “Who really wants to go through six or seven [losses in a row] and yeah, as a manager, you're definitely wondering if [the team is] going off the rails. But watching how the behind-the-scenes [worked] and how the group was coming together, and how Marco was getting his hands on things, [it all] led me to believe that we would find our way.”
Marco Sturm came into Boston and brought a system in that the Bruins have all bought in to 🐻 pic.twitter.com/7Dn0vZ6Nuu
— Spittin' Chiclets (@spittinchiclets) March 28, 2026
But in the end, Sturm proved to be an excellent leader of men and a coach who could point out mistakes and flaws in individual Bruins players while still demanding their respect and putting a smile on people’s faces when it was all said and done. The X’s and O’s were strong as well, with so many Bruins players across the board enjoying career years or serious bounce-back seasons, while they completely revamped their defensive zone coverage from traditional zone defense to a hybrid man-to-man style.
In the end, Sturm showed that he could adapt his coaching style to the personnel on his roster and collaborated well with veteran assistant coach Steve Spott and a number of holdover assistants like Chris Kelly and Jay Leach. Spott was a tremendous hire by the Bruins as well as a tried-and-true veteran voice to pair with the rookie NHL head coach and as an architect of a revamped power play that finished top 10 in the NHL even after struggling down the stretch.
Clearly, the Bruins players will get the lion’s share of the credit for the team’s turnaround, and it’s obvious that the B’s front office executed a number of tremendous moves to pave the way for a resurgence.
But it would be foolhardy to overlook Sturm’s guiding hand on the good ship Bruins while acknowledging that there will be new challenges ahead for him in the playoffs against a very experienced Buffalo coaching counterpart in Lindy Ruff. This is where things truly started to go south for Montgomery in his two-plus years at the helm in Boston when he was outmaneuvered by Paul Maurice two postseasons in a row.
A lack of confidence or readiness for the bright lights of the playoffs certainly doesn’t seem to be an issue for a player that some great Stanley Cup moments for the Black and Gold as an intrepid player.
Bruins head coach Marco Sturm's initial thoughts on facing the #Sabres to open the playoffs.
— Jon Scott (@JonScottTV) April 15, 2026
"Why did it happen at a certain time? I don't know, but I think this team is for real now." pic.twitter.com/Fl12fks2v7
“We’ll see where it goes. We know how we have to play. We’re excited,” said Sturm. “We’re bigger, stronger and we are more physical. We just have to be smart. But we’re gonna go after them, and whoever comes in — first line, second — I don’t really care. We try to play our game and not their game.
“I think that could be a game changer, that could be a series changer, that could be a lot of things. We just have to be smart about it. I know a lot of teams — they’re afraid of us. I can tell. You can see it, you can hear it, and that’s what we have to do in Buffalo.”
That sounds a lot like the memorable “piss and vinegar” qualities that B’s President Cam Neely was talking about during the preseason.
As it always the case, reputations will be solidified or altered based on the way things go in the playoffs for the Bruins, but the body of work from Sturm in his first season as B’s bench boss is worthy of recognition.