Before a single game last season and four regular-season head-to-heads this past season, the last time Bruce Cassidy went against Mike Babcock came in Jan. 2002. It was then that Cassidy, just five years removed from his playing days, was serving as the head coach of the Grand Rapids Griffins and Babcock the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks.
Cassidy recalls those AHL meetings as fast, fun, and clean. A 10-5 win for Cassidy's Griffins in their first meeting in Oct. 2001 certainly speaks to that recollection.
Since those meetings, however, Babcock has emerged as the NHL coaching elite. He has coached his teams to postseason berths in 13 of his 15 seasons behind the bench, including three runs to the Stanley Cup Finals (Babcock's Red Wings won it all in 2008). And after a franchise-record 49 wins for the Maple Leafs this season, Babcock enters the postseason with the 13th-most wins in NHL history (645). Go by playoff wins alone and Babcock's an even better 10th on the all-time wins list. Babcock's coaching excellence goes beyond the NHL, too, as he has twice coached Canada to gold at the Olympic level, and helped propel Canada to a win at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.
Cassidy, meanwhile, is still looking to advance beyond the first round for the first time in his career, having failed in his try with the Capitals in 2003 and in six games last year.
To most, this seems like a coaching mismatch. Cassidy admits as much.
"It's a tough matchup for me," the always-affable Cassidy said with a grin after Wednesday's practice. "He's had young teams, he's had veteran teams. He's had success with both, so clearly he knows how to communicate and teach to different levels of experience or intellect. I think his teams play a current style of hockey.
"You put intelligence and communicator together and generally if you have good players, you're going to have success," Cassidy continued. "He's a smart man, he's a passionate guy — I say that you can't be a good coach without passion — then you get some good players and get them to play your style and you're probably going to be OK."
But this matchup is a fascinating one because of its clash of coaching styles.
Babcock is a traditionalist in the sense that he loves his matchups. He'll match line-for-line, pairing-for-pairing all night, if you let him. Cassidy, meanwhile, focuses on the flow of the game versus simply countering what the other team is throwing out there.
Cassidy has lived and died with this philosophy throughout the regular season. It's paid off when he sensed that the Lightning were frustrated and sent out an agitating duo of Tim Schaller and Noel Acciari out there to further annoy Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov, and it's hurt them when certain lines have been overmatched by skill lines.
But his trust in throwing players back out there for another challenge has never taken him out of a game, and has been one massive work in progress to get them ready for a challenge such as the one the offensively-loaded Leafs will present in this series.
"We've had our success this year trying to keep the flow of the game, asking certain guys to handle certain responsibilities to make them better players in the end, so this time of the year they can handle it. Whether that holds for the whole playoffs, I don't know," Cassidy, whose team will dress three players for the first playoff game of their NHL career on Thursday, offered. "But that was part of the thinking: We wanted to develop guys that could play in each situation and not be fearful of it. And we didn't want to ruin the rhythm of our game with guys coming on and off the ice.
"We have done the odd hard matchup this season, but generally we have allowed our players to play. We look [for optimal matchups], but we don't chase it."
He can, of course, deviate from this, especially when having the luxury of trotting the NHL's most dominant three-zone line (the Brad Marchand-Patrice Bergeron-David Pastrnak trio) out there to counter whatever the Leafs throw at them during the games played in Boston. You can expect that to a certain degree, too, as Cassidy has tipped his hands towards matching Bergeron's line against Auston Matthews and William Nylander to begin the series. Given the way Bergeron made Matthews disappear in his only game against the Bruins -- Matthews had a woeful 18.18 Corsi-For percentage in his near eight minutes of five-on-five time matched up against Bergeron, and ultimately finished the night with a minus-2 rating and just one shot on goal in a thorough beatdown by the B's -- this would be the right (and perhaps only) call for Cassidy.
"I think that they will see Matthews and Nylander," Cassidy admitted Wednesday. "Will it be a marriage, so to speak? We have not generally chased the game for matchups. Of course it's playoff time and if we feel we need to do that, we will."
But Cassidy knows that he's not going to suddenly become Babcock. Nor does he want to if the Bruins are going to remain true to who they were in a 50-win regular season.
That means he'll trust the David Krejci line to take advantage of the offensive zone as they have all year long, expect the Noel Acciari line to establish a physical presence and be responsible in the defensive zone (something they'll need with Riley Nash on the shelf), and rely on Sean Kuraly's line to be downright disruptive. To Cassidy, the opposition is irrelevant should those lines hold up their end of the bargain that comes with their deployment.
"I probably lose the matchups then, right?" Cassidy joked of trying to suddenly match Babcock's style in this series. "Everyone has their own school of thought."
From Grand Rapids to Cincy, and now to the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
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