Bruce, All Mighty

By Mike Wise
Friday, October 10, 2008

They all say he hasn't changed. His players. His bosses. Himself. Yet Bruce Boudreau, hockey's Crash Davis, who spent 32 years in the minor leagues as a player and coach, pulled up to work yesterday in a Mercedes sedan. He left for the team flight to Atlanta for the Capitals' first game of the season dressed in coal-black, pinstriped wool, with a mauve shirt and matching tie.

What gives, Coach Slapshot?

"The suit is 200 bucks," Boudreau explained. "It's not exactly Jos. [A. Bank], you know."

The car, it turns out, was leased to the NHL's 2008 coach of the year after he filmed a commercial for a local car dealership in which his only request was a "Cup holder. A big Cup holder." His wife, Crystal, often co-opts it, leaving Boudreau with a Chevy Impala he often prefers over luxury.

"If I can ever learn the [Mercedes's] buttons, I'll be a real wizard," he said. "Oh, man, I don't know what the hell they are."

Chris Clark, the Capitals' veteran right wing, said: "He's looking for a suit promotion, so if there's anybody out there that can help him . . . "

"Same stains on his shirt, same lines," said David Steckel, the Capitals' second-year center, who played for Boudreau in Washington last season and with the Capitals' American Hockey League affiliate in Hershey, Pa., where Boudreau was plucked from last Thanksgiving to take over a cellar-smelling, 6-14-1 team. He was named head coach on an "interim" basis.

"He only knows how to coach one way, the way that's successful," Steckel said. "So I don't think he'll ever change."

Maybe not, but the expectations have -- going from, oh, roughly nothing to everything in less than six months.

That great back story of the 53-year-old, frumpy, stumpy puck lifer from Toronto, who finally got his shot to coach an NHL team and responded by guiding Alex Ovechkin and his teammates to the Southeast Division title on the last day of the regular season? Who went the distance with the Flyers in a pulsating, seven-game series, two weeks of theater that made forever-suffering Caps fans euphoric about their hockey team again?

So last season.

"The big difference is we're not surprising anybody," Boudreau said yesterday in Arlington before the Caps left for Atlanta, the day before Saturday's banner-hanging opening night at Verizon Center.

Indeed, 11 months after he left Hershey for good -- Boudreau rents his house out in the home town of the Hershey Bears -- he is the NHL's Jack Adams Award winner who coaches the most electrifying young player in the game, Ovechkin, and a very nice blend of old and new.

A year ago, the big question was whether he could stop owner Ted Leonsis's franchise from plummeting any further. Or whether Boudreau, almost the Jim Zorn of unlikely NHL coaching hires, could save General Manager George McPhee's job, while simultaneously proving he could translate his attacking, bang-bang style of play from the minors to the NHL.

After such a dizzying run, the removal of the interim tag and a multiyear contract that will play Boudreau upwards of $1 million -- real job security after a playing career in which he bounced from the minors to the NHL and back down again 26 times -- the list of issues are larger and longer. Like:

· Can the chatterbox coach nicknamed "Gabby" extract the same passion he did the final two months of last season for most of nine months, so the Caps can make a genuine run toward the Stanley Cup?

· Will Ovie and the kiddie corps keep getting better? Can Ovechkin, Alexander Semin, Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Green, Jeff Schultz and the others all make the leap to contend this season?

· Are second-tier players like Steckel, Tomas Fleischmann, Eric Fehr and Shaone Morrisonn going to provide Boudreau with the depth he needs?

· Do two former Red Army icons -- Sergei Fedorov, who turns 39 this year, and Viktor Kozlov, who is 33 -- have enough left in their legs or will their longevity slow them down?

· And maybe most important, can José Théodore, a guy who used to stand on his head to make saves, replace the goaltending loss of Cristobal Huet, who parlayed a couple hot months in Washington into free agent millions in Chicago -- nearly leaving the Caps empty-handed in goal?

Boudreau knows his entertaining, high-scoring team is an outside pick by a few observers to play for the Cup, but "we're not the Detroit Red Wings where everybody is in awe of us."

"It's a nice choice because it's a choice nobody's thinking about," he said. "But if they pick anybody other than Detroit they do it because they can say, 'See, I told you so.' But on paper how can you not pick Detroit?"

Even after last season, can you blame Boudreau if he angles for the underdog role?

"Slap Shot," the 1977 cult movie about minor league hockey, is available for free on local cable. Click play and there he is in the green jersey, No. 7, for the Hyannis Port Presidents, a mop of black hair almost down to his shoulders framed by rich, dark sideburns. A 22-year-old celebrates in front of the net after a teammate's goal.

"I knew where the cameras were the whole time," Boudreau said. He received $1,200 as an extra, a fortune for him then, calling it "the greatest two weeks of my life at the time."

He was a player for the Johnstown Jets, and the late Paul Newman (who played Charlestown Chiefs Coach Reggie Dunlop) actually used his room for part of the filming.

"I might have had, in total, five minutes of conversation with the man," Boudreau said. "But he seemed like a very down-to-earth guy for the stature that he has. He was a superstar in every sense of the word and he treated me like a long-lost friend. It's a sad passing."

Thirty-odd years later, Ontario's Joe Sixpack, a minor leaguer until last Thanksgiving, now endorses Mercedes and coaches Alexander the Great. He is asked if the past year changed him.

"I hope not," Boudreau said. "I don't think so. If anything I've had changed, hopefully I got a little smarter."

"I'm very lucky," he added. "This is a tremendous job. I wish more people could have the luxury of what it's like to be in the NHL. From that standpoint, I'll never take it for granted. But you get used to it.

"Now you come to work, you say, 'Hi Alex,' and you're not in awe of anything."