The Sheet with Jeff Marek - On the Sheet: Bruce Boudreau

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Bruce Boudreau joined Jeff Marek to provide some insight on the JT Miller/Elias Pettersson situation in Vancouver and tell some Ovechkin/Backstrom stories...Watch the Sekeres & Price interview with Gary Brown of The Globe & Mail: https://youtu.be/lPaUzMYghkA?feature=sharedShout out to our sponsors!👍🏼Fan Duel: https://www.fanduel.com/Reach out to [e-mail] to connect with our Sales Team and discuss opportunities to partner with us!If you liked this, check out:🚨 OTT - Coming in Hot Sens | https://www.youtube.com/c/thewallyandmethotshow🚨 TOR - LeafsNation | https://www.youtube.com/@theleafsnation401🚨 EDM - OilersNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Oilersnationdotcom🚨 VAN - CanucksArmy | https://www.youtube.com/@Canucks_Army🚨 CGY - FlamesNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Flames_Nation🚨 Daily Faceoff Fantasy & Betting | www.youtube.com/@DFOFantasyandBetting____________________________________________________________________________________________Connect with us on ⬇️Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/daily_faceoff💻 Website: https://www.dailyfaceoff.com🐦 Follow on twitter: https://x.com/DailyFaceoff💻 Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailyfaceoffDaily Faceoff Merch:https://nationgear.ca/collections/daily-faceoff Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All right, our feature guest is with us now. He is someone that needs no introduction. He is a great coach. He's a great broadcaster, a great storyteller. He is the one and only Bruce Boudreau who joins me now on the sheet. Bruce, how are you today, pal? Good to see you and hear from you now. Well, good to see you, Jeff. And I've got your answer to your previous question. Okay, let's hear it. Okay. A father brings his kid to the rink and he grabs the kid's hat and he slows it on the rink for the first one and he keeps his on his head and then when

you get another hat trick, he picks his hat up and he throws his on. That's just the explanation. I was going to say, is this coming from like personal history with with you and Ben going to games like I'm going to throw my kid's hat on the ice here first. Have you ever, by the way, have you ever been to a double hat trick game? Have you ever been involved in one? You know what? My memory is not good enough.

We scored an awful lot of goals in Washington. And you know, I mean, I'm sure with the Marlies when I was growing up, we had a tremendous team and we, you know what, that in junior in Brantford, we averaged over 10 goals a game at home. So I mean, we had to, we had to have had two actors. I just don't know. I just can't remember when.

Okay, let's get right to this sort of the issue of the day, which Bruce has been has been dragging on. I want to say all season, but it's even been before that. Like I had heard about this and a lot of other people did, the situation between Pedersen and JT Miller going back a couple of years. At some point, it's a contained fire and then it rages and it goes away and it comes back and then, you know, after both Miller and Pedersen have denied any rift, Jim Motherford comes out in the Globe and Mail and says, yeah,

this is a essentially situation untenable. I mean, you've been there to watch all this, been behind the bench watching it as someone who follows the NHL. Like what's gone through your mind following all of this for all these years? Well, I don't know why it's, I guess, come to head right now. I mean, um, the, the same two guys that were there playing last year and you

never heard anything about it, uh, because they were winning the year before. When I was there, um, guys didn't get, get along off the ice, but I mean, they were both basically a hundred points scorers playing on the same line. You knew that they, they weren't going to go to each other's, uh, birthday parties, but at the same time, uh, I've been on a lot of teams where there was certain fractions of the teams that never got, uh, never got along. I think that's, I mean, it'd be an impossibility if everybody loved one another. But, um, so I don't know.

I, and to be honest, the only, uh, contact I've had with any of them is when they've reached a milestone and I congratulate them by text. So, I mean, uh, it's, I don't know what's different that's going on. I don't know if they're having slugfest in the dressing room or the media in Vancouver has a tendency to make things an awful lot worse than it is. But if, if Jim is talking about it now, then I mean, he's known about it since he's been there. So, I mean, I'm just wondering why now all of a sudden

it's becoming an issue. You know, the thing that I wonder about, I'm not sure if you have a thought on this one or not, but the thing that I wonder about reading Jim's comments, you know, he's talking about, you know, this is a situation that's untenable and these two are just not getting along and, you know, we're gonna make a trade

and I might not even get a second line center. But it almost seems as if Rutherford is preparing the market here, essentially for the Vancouver Canucks to lose a trade. And I think a couple of things, is it at the point where, in your opinion, this has to happen? Like there's some situations where

you just gotta get one or both out. Like you've tried, it hasn't worked. And it almost feels like Rutherford is saying, you know what? We have to do something now and we're probably going to lose this trade. Well, I mean, that sounds like something Jim would do is his announced it before it happened that he wasn't going to win the trade. So no one would come back on him, but. But you know what? When it comes to wanting to win and play, they're both alphas. They both want the situations. They both want

the ice time. They both want the puck. And you know what? Sometimes it doesn't work. I mean, it, it, it worked when I think you put a PD on the wing with one of them or bull Horvat was playing with one of them. But, uh, I think, I think obviously it's got to the point where it's, it's not working now and if you have to, you, you've got to make the best of a bad situation. And if that's the case, move one of them. I would think that with Miller, I think he has a no trade at this point and Patterson doesn't, his no trade doesn't kick in till next year or July at some point. So I mean, it, to me, and again, not knowing the situation and I'm guessing, I'm wondering if one of them were asked to be out rather than, you know, like if they said, hey listen, I'm

not enjoying this, I'm not having fun, I love the game of hockey but I'm not having fun right now, maybe it would be best for me to move to somewhere else. Maybe that's the situation. How did you make it work? I mean it's kind of an open secret for everybody. How, I mean, how were you able to do this? Like part of me is like, I can only imagine what Rick Hawket is going through here. How did you do it, Gabby?

Well, I mean, the one thing I can honestly say is you don't paint the same person with one brush. In other words, I mean, there's rules that are rules on the team and that, but I mean, both, I always used to think that it was my job as a coach to find the Achilles heel on the player and find what makes them play best and use that to your advantage. Like it might be a kick in the ass, it might be a pat on the back, it might be taking ice time away from them, it might be fining them, it might be sending them out, whatever it took, something hits a court.

Like, I mean, you remember the days when in Toronto we had, maybe not that old, Ian Turnbull. Of course. Five goals in a game. I mean, yes, but the one thing about Ian Turnbull, I mean, there was very little you could do unless he was self-motivated. Like I mean, if he took ice time away, he'd go, eh, have you kicked him off the ice and practice and go, eh, you know, like, I mean, but Roger had to find what made him work. And evidently for most nights he found out what it was, what it was.

But I mean, it's, it's that same thing of making a understanding, you know, sometimes coaches put guys to the fourth line instead of the first line. They embarrass them in public, but it's, it's the coach's job to make it work. I thought with me, the best thing I did, I think with Pedersen was to make him feel really important and to give him confidence. I think at the point in time when I took over his, his wrist was just getting healthy again. And he did have a lack of confidence and that's self-confidence. He's very confident in his game. He knows how good he is and what he wants to be, but it's, and so I think I built him

up pretty good with Miller. You just talk straightforward to him. He's, I was going to say, if I can pause on, on Pedersen there for a second, because he's someone that I don't know that we know a lot about. He keeps a lot of things very personal, as everybody knows. He's not the most outward person. He's very shy. You knew him better than most people do.

Like you talk about his motivation, he needs confidence and reassurance. What do you think we should know about Elias Pettersson that maybe hasn't been, hasn't been talked about, discussed, reported? What do you think we should know about him? You know what? I don't know off the top of my head, Jeff. What I do know about him is how skilled he was. Like the first day I got there, he asked me, he said, I want to kill penalties.

And our penalty killing was historically crappy when I got there. And the one thing I saw him on the penalty killing, his ability to read plays, to anticipate was unbelievable. And to have eyes basically in the back of your head is what he had. And he had a tremendous shot. Those are the things that you notice right away. You notice that he's not an elite, elite skater, but he gets there. But his hockey sense was what I thought. People use this way too much off the charts and amazing in that I just thought it was above most people that I had coached. I mean it was right up there hockey sense with Nick Baxter type thing. And which is a great compliment because he's my favorite player of all time.

So I mean those are the kind of things that I noticed about him. With Miller it was one of those things that if you said he can't do it he'd say yeah I'll show you. He was like totally old school. He wouldn't he wouldn't sulk. He never sulked. He battled. He competed and I think his biggest thing is he wanted everybody to compete as hard as him. And it would, in practice, in office and stuff like that, I think it would, it's the one thing that makes him great and it's the other thing that makes him sometimes go off the deep end a little bit. Because he doesn't have a filter. I mean, he'll tell you if he doesn't like what you're doing.

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Peloton, visit Peloton at OnePeloton.ca. You know, that's interesting because when you say that, one of the places I think about, I think about Blake Wheeler and Patrick Lyoné, you know, guys that run the room hot, guys that run the practice hot. When you see that as a coach, like instinctively, do you like that when you see someone sort of running the practice hot or running the room hot? Well, what do you mean by hot? Let me start with that. Well, someone who's perhaps crossing over the line

of being aggressive with his teammates to get the desired result. There, as you mentioned, like, the old saying is like, you know, there's an 18 inch difference between a pat on the back and a kick in the ass. They're pretty close. And there are some guys,

I always say like, are you playing, like the old politics line is, are you playing shield or are you playing sword? And some guys play sword all the time when they should be playing shield every now and then. It can kind of chafe based on your personality. So as a coach, when you see that, someone who's like on and on and maybe it's just with one guy, over and over and over again, are you the kind of coach that would say,

that's enough or yeah, you know what? The way you make a strong sword is you heat it up and you pound it with a hammer. Well, I will. The best way to me answer to that is, you know, me and JT had had some talks about him being the sword a little too often and he understood. And then a lot of times he would watch the video or look at the time sheets on how much ice time he played and say, oh yeah, sorry man. Sometimes we forget, like he's very hot tempered but at the same time every party was organized by him. Everything that was going on at the house was going on at his house.

His kids were always, you know, the first and foremost, like all of those things. But when he got it, gets into a game, his like, I mean, he, there's not too many people I've ever seen that want the right outcome more than him. And sometimes when that's not going as well as it should, it sort of gets bottled up and then all of a sudden the, the, uh, explosion comes. But I mean, uh, I thought, I remember saying this to a friend back, uh, when I had him that he's as good a player as I've ever seen, could pass, could shoot, uh, take them on my team anytime.

Once you were able to understand where he was coming from. And the funny thing is I can say the same thing about Pedersen. If you can understand him, like it's funny, like when we play Colorado or Edmonton, both of them would come up and say, I want, I want McKinnon or McDavid. They wanted to play against them. They wanted the challenge. Those guys did, but they just have different ways of going about it. PD is very quiet, as you know, it reminds me almost of how quiet the Sedenes were.

And I didn't even know, didn't even know them, but I'm just assuming they were fairly quiet players, you know, when they play, I mean, their action spoke volumes, but I mean, they didn't seem like the scream and yell type kind of guys. And that's what you've got is a very quiet guy, and you've got a very boisterous guy. I think they both want the same results, but, um, one will never yell at the other one. And one will sometimes take his anger out, even if his anger is, is at himself, we'll take it out on other people. You know, um, one of the other personalities here through all this that we're wondering about is Quinn Hughes.

And when I think of Hart Trophy, like the definition of what's valuable to his team. You know, this year's edition of the Vancouver Canucks are profoundly different when Quinn Hughes is not in the lineup. Like it is, it's not apples and oranges, it's chalk and cheese. Like that's how different this, this team is

without, without Quinn Hughes in the lineup. Um, one of the things that I've, that I've wondered about, because, you know, this, the story about, you know, someone in Vancouver encouraging you to see if Quinn Hughes could play center when you had three strong centers already. I wonder, like, if you went to Quinn Hughes and said, Hey, you want to try playing center, what do you think he would have said? Well, first of all, he would have laughed at me.

Then I would have got a call definitely from his dad. And I'm saying that not that his dad is interfering, but his dad was my assistant coach in Manchester, so I know Jim pretty good. But I mean, it's only common sense, quite frankly. I mean, we had Horvat Pedersen and Miller. Who was they going to change them into a center and become the fourth line center on the team? I mean, Quinn Hughes is arguably the best passer I've ever seen. And I had some great passers and get slapped and pay and get slapped and backstrum and such, but he is a competitive, he's one of those guys that gets out of bed, comes to practice. His hair is all about himself, but once he steps on the ice, he's all business.

Yeah. And I mean, uh, I mean, I think, and I agree with you a hundred percent that I look at it and, and watch him play and he is dominant every shift he's on on the ice. And I can't believe how good he is. And if the Canucks do make the playoffs this year, I mean, I don't care what his point total is. I mean, if there's, if there's enough people out there that watch him, he should be a heart candidate, uh, heart trophy candidate because he is so valuable to that team. I've grown to, I mean, watching Quinn, I mean, we would talk in the summer quite a few times over the summer and what he was working on and everything else.

And, and this kid wants to be the best in the world. And that's just his makeup. And I think he is. I think, I mean, boy, I can't even imagine the media coverage. If he was in Toronto on a really good team, it would be ridiculous. But I mean, I think he's a great player. He's probably a quiet captain. He's a great player.

He's probably a quiet captain. I don't foresee him being a, uh, uh, a guy coming in and giving crap to a lot of players or anything like that. But I mean, his actions are what he does on the ice and what he does on the ice is he never complains, plays 25 to 30 minutes every night, and if there's a chance to score and the reason he's scoring more, one of the biggest things he ever wanted to do, we would talk in the summer, is he wanted to shoot more. He wanted to jump more. And now, I mean, I think he's going to approach 20 goals in a season pretty soon. Last summer, that's what he did. It's funny you mentioned that Bruce, because that's the way, all the greats did this.

You know, remember that first year of the Crosby, trying to aim every, he lost every draw, was just brutal. And then he spent like the whole summer just drop box, drop box, drop box. That was Quinn Hughes this summer. He was just, you've got to get the shot to the next level. And all of a sudden Quinn Hughes, I mean, when you had him, was he much of a shooting threat from the, from the point on the PowerPoint? Not, not the first year that he was like eight and 65 in a cyst type thing, you know, like, and, and then like he, over the summer,

he says, I'm going to shoot coach, I'm going to shoot, I'm practicing my shot, it's getting better. The other thing he, he, that that's his character and he played hockey all summer long, obviously, uh, is he would say, Hey, listen, do, um, I know we need a right handed shot defenseman, but I'm going to play the right D all summer long just in case you need me at that position and need to move somebody to a different spot. I mean, that's what kind of great guy and that's what probably made him a captive. He's that kind of guy. You know what I thought you were going to say, Bruce?

I thought you were going to say, I'll be like Gordy and learn to shoot the other way too. Oh yeah I don't think he's quite there yet. Bruce before I let you go and listen I know you're busy and you're cramming in time here for me and I always appreciate it but I can't let you go without asking you mentioned Nick Baxter from earlier your favorite player like I've always looked at you know you look at that draft class and the points that he put up and what he was able to do. I think that of, of everybody from that draft class, and that was the draft in

Vancouver, Eric Johnson goes first overall. Um, to me, he's the one guy that we don't talk about enough. You talk about quiet superstars. He was a quiet superstar. Um, you know, it was always seemed that, you know, injuries derailed it, but that Ovechkin and Backstrom always wanted to end their careers together. Share a word or two about Nick Backstrom, uh, because I don't want anyone to ever forget how great this guy was.

You know what? And he would be known so much better, quite frankly, but Alex's personality is so strong that it's just so over overwhelmed Nick's personality. And we also had strong personalities. Mike Green had a very strong personality. Then you had Fedorov and you had four other, uh, three or four other Russians that were on the team.

But Nick was quietly like, I mean, when I got there he was fourth line center and I moved him up to Ovi right away because they sat beside each other. They were both young and first of all, he's the only one that when I got moved on to other teams, no matter what any game that we played him, he would come out and say hi to other teams, no matter what, any game that we played them, he would come out and say hi to my wife, my kids, me. I mean, and he was the, he's as nice as you're ever going to see. I mean, I wish, I, I wish his, like after his, his contract's up, I'd love to try him again, because I mean, I think, I think he could still play if his hip was fine.

But I mean, uh, cause he's as smart as smart as there is, there's just nobody's smarter than him. And a quiet dedication. He never missed anything, any games, uh, uh, when he wasn't, I mean, I'm talking about a pregame skates. He was there. He, he was attentive. I mean, there was not one thing about him that you could say, you know what? That guy's really a dink right now. And I mean, uh was not one thing about him that you could say, you know what? That guy's really a dink right now.

And I mean, uh, I don't like him. Like, I mean, I don't remember a practice that he took off where he didn't try. I don't remember one time that he looked at me and gave me that cock-eyed look like saying, are you insane or not? Or, or what? I mean, to me, he was, he was the perfect player. Uh, we miss seeing him. I know I certainly do. Um, he was, he was the perfect player. Uh, we miss seeing them. I know I certainly do.

Um, Gabby, you're the best. Uh, thanks as always for stopping by. Uh, Oh, a quick word on Ben. How's Ben doing in Niagara? Ben's Ben's doing okay. And I appreciate, uh, uh, all the time you talk to them and, and you know what I mean for a team that's been in last place for five years, uh, in around three years, they're now in second place and they're trying to hold that spot.

And, um, I think sometimes they do it with smoke and mirrors, but I was in the room with Ben for the last couple of games that they played and he commands the room. I mean, and he, he just, like, I listened to him and I could see if I was an 18 year old kid, how I'd want to go through a wall for him. I mean, I hope I'm not embarrassed by this, but he, he's got that, that emotion, that energy that everybody loves and he's never down. And that's a, that's a great thing.

No matter if the team's doing good or bad, he's finding a way to make it a positive situation. So I hope at one point that somebody gives him a chance at a higher level if that's what he wants. And, uh, cause I think he'd be very good as a coach at another level. Uh, his time will come. I remember I first met him when he was a runner at hockey night in Canada and I'll always like by now he's a, now he's a head coach of the Niagara Ice Dogs, the OHL and big things on the horizon too. And I love his... You know, he used to get in so much crap because

they would be doing games for us and for Washington and he'd be cheering like crazy at love for the when they scored. And when he was telling me the other day that what he found out, he said that When he, when he, he was telling me the other day that what he found out, he said that, that on, um, that hockey night had found out who the nominees for the Jack Adams were and they had to tell him cause they had to get a screen ready for it. He phoned me right away and said, this is scoop that, this is. Insider Ben Boudreaux. Insider Benny Boudreaux. Insider Benny Boudreaux. Listen, being happy and charming and positive is a Boudreaux trait obviously. Gabby, thanks as always

for stopping by pal. Anytime Jeff, thank you. Every day this month I can't get out my head Lost all ambitions day to day Guess I can call it a rut I went to the dark man He tried to give me a little medicine I'm like, nah man, that's fine I'm not against those methods but I knew It's me, myself and Alex gonna be fixing my mind

I do wanna break it I turned on the music I do wanna break it I turned on the music But you turned up, down, out And got you sometimes losing Helping on the things that went wrong The end.