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