Bruce Cassidy and the Vegas Golden Knights winning the Stanley Cup this week has understandably opened the door to plenty of criticism for the Bruins, who fired Cassidy almost exactly one year ago.
While the Bruins broke records during a historic regular season under new coach Jim Montgomery, they collapsed in the first round of the playoffs and found themselves watching Cassidy’s run from home.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the Bruins would have won the Cup this year, or even gone further than the first round, if they had kept Cassidy. It’s a point NESN analyst Andrew Raycroft drove home on Thursday.
Appearing on Gresh & Fauria with Christian Fauria and Lou Merloni, Razor made the case that coaching changes are almost a natural cycle in the NHL, and that it may very well have been time for the Bruins and Cassidy to split up, even though Cassidy was a good coach and even though he won it all in his first year away.
Listen to the full segment below, with the Bruins talk right at the beginning:
“There will be a players’ coach following Bruce Cassidy [in Vegas], correct?,” Merloni asked, referencing the theme in all sports of teams bringing in a “players’ coach” after a disciplinarian and vice versa.
“No question,” Raycroft said. “It’ll be a Jim Montgomery-type in four or five years out there, even with winning the Cup. There’s a group of seven, eight NHL coaches that play off of each other. It’s like each guy gets hired in behind each other because it’s the right fit. Bruce Cassidy was the perfect fit to go out to Las Vegas. They had a great team. Everything’s in place. They missed the playoffs last season, so he can come in and crack the whip.
“It just doesn’t work to say that if he was here [in Boston], they would’ve won the Cup. They went on a completely different path. They were in the West, Bruins are in the East. There’s all kinds of reasons for it [his firing]. The main one, to your point, is it’s six years in one place. That’s a max for almost every NHL coach, or any pro coach.
“Six years is a long time to be hearing the same voice. For Bruce, it’s great. No one ever said he was a bad coach and that’s why he got fired. That never came up. That’s never been the issue. It was expected from most hockey people that he was gonna do really well. That’s what the Vegas Golden Knights needed.”
I have made the same points on The Skate Podcast and am pretty much in line with Razor here. Still, it’s fair to wonder why Bruins players apparently no longer supported or believed in Cassidy. It’s understandable why some fans and media have questioned whether they lacked the mental toughness to handle Cassidy’s blunt criticism.
To that point, my Skate Pod co-host Brian DeFelice said on Thursday’s episode that his problem is more about why a coaching change was needed, not whether it was needed.
“For me, it’s not even a Bruce Cassidy issue or a Don Sweeney issue. To me, it’s a player issue,” he said. “…While, yes, I acknowledge that maybe his message grew stale and I acknowledge that he wasn’t a popular guy in the room, my question is: Maybe it was time for a change, but why was change necessary?
“It’s not because he wasn’t a good coach. It’s because the players, they just don’t have that maturity, I don’t think, up and down the lineup. Maybe the veterans do. But all I know is the Bruins players got their wish: Big, bad Cassidy is gone, and they were bounced in the first round this year. So for me, it’s a player issue. There’s something off in that room.”
Listen to the latest Skate Pod below: