Coaching Ovie

Boudreau: Plenty of stories

"Gabby: Confessions of a Hockey Lifer," by Bruce Boudreau and Tim Leone, Potomac Books Inc

Alex Ovechkin skated in alone. Nothing but open ice between him and Marc-Andre Fleury. It was the first period in game 7 between the Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins at the Verizon Center and Ovie was one-on-one. As he drew closer to the cage, I thought to myself: "Goal."

Everyone watching the game must have thought: "Goal."

Fleury thought to himself: "No goal."

And there it was. Fleury stoned Ovechkin and the rest is history. The huge save sucked all the life out of Washington, who just weren't at the races in the final game of a thrilling series, as the Penguins trampled the Caps and marched onto the Stanley Cup.

Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau knows how different it could have been, as he looks back on that save in his autobiography:

"I truly believe that if Alex had scored on the breakaway early in the game, it would have been a totally different game."

Ups and downs

For Boudreau the memory of that ugly night has lingered since May and it'll stay with him until the Caps can make amends in next year's playoffs. As unlikely as Ovechkin's miss was, the fact that Boudreau was coaching a player of his calibre in that game is perhaps more unlikely.

"I'm not what anybody pictures as an NHL head coach," writes Boudreau, with co-author Tim Leone.

That statement kicks off Boudreau's entertaining tour of the hockey ladder, with its ups and downs, hirings and firings and insight into the mind of a coach, whose perceived underachievement as a player powered his success in his second career.

"Gabby," which gets its title from the nickname Boudreau was given as a youngster on the Toronto Marlies junior team, is roughly divided into three thirds: Boudreau as a player, Boudreau as a minor league coach and Boudreau in charge of the Caps.

He downplays his success as a player (11th highest scorer in AHL history) and instead focuses on the people he met along the way who influenced his career, including Barry Melrose, Scotty Bowman and the late Roger Neilson.

Boudreau on Melrose: "I still use some Melrose drills. One thing I've taken from Barry is the idea of emotion. He's an emotional coach and knows the right words to say. He really works on players' emotions. I do that to a certain extent too."

Boudreau on Bowman: "He always had insightful comments...It left me thinking, Wow, this is why he's a hockey genius."

Boudreau on Neilson: "Roger had an approach that was interesting, I retained everything he said. Being with him made me an awful lot smarter about hockey."

After reading Gabby, you'll definitely want to grab Slap Shot of the shelf and give it another look. Not because that's how Boudreau's teams play, but because he's got a cameo in it. Boudreau reveals how he taught Paul Newman to take a slap shot and even while describing his role in the movie he can't resist using it as another opportunity for some self-deprecating humour:

"...I just skated around the goal like a big ham because I knew that's where the cameras were focused. I never went into the corner and got the puck - probably pretty similar to my actual playing style. Hey, it got me onto the theatre screen."

Boudreau clearly regrets how he failed to give 100 per cent as a player as he made a series of bad decisions, which combined to limit his impact in the NHL. As an inductee into the AHL Hall of Fame, Boudreau clearly had the ability to play in the NHL, especially at a time when the rosters weren't as deep. But it wasn't to be, and the harsh lessons he learned made coaching easier to pick up. He could empathise with players because he knew just what it felt like to be sent back down to the minors or told: "You're not playing tonight."

Emotional

After Boudreau transitions from player to coach, he gets a big wake-up call:

"Boy, your first year coaching, when you come from being a player, you don't have a clue.... I had no idea what I was doing."

While learning the ropes during his first year in charge of the Muskegon Fury in the IHL, Boudreau starts to understand the value of building rivalries. He doesn't need to say a word to sell tickets for a Caps-Pens game in Washington nowadays, but he learned the art of promoting in the minor leagues - something that isn't lost on some teams in the EIHL.

After winning the Calder Cup in 2005/06 and returning to the final in 2006/07 as head coach of the Hershey Bears, Boudreau admits he thought his shot at an NHL coaching job was all but gone when the phone didn't ring all summer. His coaching career was on the verge of mirroring his playing career and he was destined to be an AHL legend, which is great, but - well, you know what that means.

Of course, he got the dream job and once he joins the Caps "Gabby" becomes a real insight into how an NHL coach has to go about his business. Even NHLers need motivating at times as they dredge their way through an 82-game regular season and Boudreau's positive hints and emotional appeals form some of the most interesting pages in the book.

It hasn't always been easy for Boudreau to communicate with players though, as he once had the pleasure of dealing with Sean Avery. While Boudreau was coaching in the AHL with the LA Kings-affiliate Manchester Monarchs, Avery was sent down from the major league at the end of the 2002/03 season. Boudreau blasts Avery, blaming him for mailing it in after the Monarchs crashed out of the playoffs against the Bridgeport Sound Tigers that year.

The two butt heads again in the 2008/09 NHL playoffs when Boudreau's Caps went up against Avery and the New York Rangers. This was after Avery's suspension for that Elisha Cuthbert remark, but he still showed that he hadn't lost his touch by delivering a brutal personal insult to Boudreau. The coach's experience with Avery paid off though as he reined in Ovechkin and company, telling them not to respond before Washington eventually knocked the Rangers out.

Avery and the occasional firing aside, Boudreau's story is a very sunny tale. As Don Cherry writes in the foreword: "It is about positive thinking and never giving up."

Boudreau didn't give up on becoming an NHL coach, and now there's something else for him to not give up on. He didn't want to be in the NHL just because he could stay in high-class hotels and take the plane instead of the bus. He wants to win. We'll have to wait and see what happens if Ovechkin skates in alone on Fleury again next year.