When last we checked in on the Washington Capitals, head coach Bruce Boudreau had just risked a confrontation with his star player, Alex Ovechkin, in order to prove a point about who was really in control in the team’s locker room.
A little less than four weeks later, Ovechkin and his massive contract are still here, Boudreau is out of a job and team legend Dale Hunter is behind the bench as the team’s new head coach.
So what the heck happened? While the dramatic reversal in Boudreau’s career might have come as a surprise to some, it ought to be clear that this move has been coming for some time. While Boudreau got to 200 wins faster than any other coach in the history of the NHL, the real test in the league is postseason success, and in that area, Boudreau had come up short. Over four postseasons, the Caps lost three Game Sevens on home ice against teams they were favored to beat. Moreover, while they advanced to the second round of the playoffs last season, they were rudely dismissed in a four-game sweep by the Tampa Bay Lightning, a team Washington was expected to defeat easily.
With that in mind, it isn’t terribly surprising that Boudreau was apparently operating with a short leash this season. After the season-opening winning streak came to an end, it didn’t take long for the wheels to come completely off the bus, as the team continued to turn in on-ice performances that were both sub-par and uninspiring.
The death watch began when the team displayed no fight in the third period of a 4-1 loss in Winnipeg. Just two nights later, the team was steamrolled 7-1 in Toronto by a Maple Leafs team dealing with so many injuries it had to fill out much of its roster with minor league call-ups.
But the coup de grace was delivered over Thanksgiving weekend when the team dropped back-to-back games to the New York Rangers and the Buffalo Sabres, games where the high-priced lineup seemed less than interested in executing against Boudreau’s defensive system. After that, all that was left to do was for George McPhee, the team’s general manager, to summon Boudreau to his home on Monday morning to deliver the bad news.
So what’s next? Hunter, who already appeared behind the team’s bench last night in a 2-1 loss to St. Louis a little more than 24 hours after getting the job, wasn’t exactly a finesse guy during his 19-year NHL career, and there’s little doubt that his style behind the bench will be anything other than hard-nosed. He’s already moved to put his own mark on the team, dismissing one of Boudreau’s assistants that the team had retained, while also banishing blue liner Jeff Schultz to the press box last night — presumably in response to his sloppy play in recent weeks.
The talk around town right now is that Boudreau was a player’s coach all along, but one who couldn’t convince anyone he had become a disciplinarian once things started to go wrong. As for Hunter, the only player in NHL history to compile 1,000 points as well as more than 3,000 penalty minutes (for you math majors, that’s the equivalent of spending almost 60 full games in the penalty box over the course of a career — he presumably won’t have the same problem convincing his new charges that he means business.
Eric McErlain blogs at Off Wing Opinion, a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner. In 2006 he wrote a “bloggers bill of rights” to help integrate bloggers into the Washington Capitals’ press box. Eric has also written for Deadspin, NBC Sports and the Sporting News, and covers sports television for The TV News. Follow Eric on Twitter.