Big-Time Bench Bosses

Of the first eleven Providence Bruins head coaches, only three failed to leave on a favorable note. The other eight were either elevated to a position in Boston’s front office or accepted an offer from another NHL team. Six of them have had a head-coaching tenure in The Show after leaving Rhode Island, while another went on to become a general manager.

            One former Baby B’s bench boss, Bob Francis, has won the NHL’s annual coaching prize, the Jack Adams Award, doing so with the Phoenix Coyotes in 2002. Two more, Peter Laviolette and Mike Sullivan, worked together on the 2006 U.S. Olympic team’s staff. Scott Gordon followed their tracks to the 2010 Games, where he assisted Providence College alum Ron Wilson on Team USA’s run to a silver medal.

            Laviolette and Sullivan have also put in multiple Stanley Cup Final appearances. Laviolette led the Carolina Hurricanes to the title in 2006 and the Philadelphia Flyers on a Cinderella run to the fourth round in 2010. Sullivan, a midseason replacement in 2015-16, delivered a Cup to Pittsburgh at season’s end.

And the next year, on the heels of the P-Bruins’ twenty-fifth campaign, Laviolette (now with Nashville) and Sullivan constituted the first all-American coaching matchup in Stanley Cup Final history. Sullivan’s Penguins repeated as champs by warding off Laviolette’s upset-minded Predators in six games.

 

            The most successful P-Bruins head coaches have packed a combination of youth and prior ties with the organization. They have generally been in their mid-to-late thirties upon hire and entered with any given mix of playing or assistant-coaching experience with Boston or Providence.

            That theme began with Mike O’Connell, an assistant to Rick Bowness in Boston who survived the foreman’s firing after the 1991-92 season. O’Connell, who had also played for the NHL Bruins for all or part of six seasons, previously supervised the San Diego Gulls during the 1990-91 IHL season. That team was an unremarkable 30-45-8 playoff no-go. Nevertheless, when the Bruins transferred their top prospects from Maine to Providence, they replaced E.J. McGuire with O’Connell as part of the front-office shakeup.

            With his second shot at head coaching in place, a thirty-seven-going-on-thirty-eight-year-old O’Connell did his part to help Rhode Island make good on its second shot at the AHL. The team’s run to first place in the Northern Division under his guidance kept a fervent fan base coming en route to the league’s attendance championship. The club retained the latter distinction in 1993-94 despite the sophomore slide in the standings. In addition, despite the shoddy showing in the win column, O’Connell was brought back to Boston to apprentice under Harry Sinden upstairs.

            Under O’Connell, the P-Bruins set an immediate tone for one core objective in honing high-end prospects. In terms of alternating their illumination for both cities, Glen Murray and Jozef Stumpel were his top two pupils.

In the inaugural season, Stumpel made thirteen appearances for the parent club, which limited him to fifty-six games in the AHL. But in that span, he posted a radiant ninety-two points. The next year, he averaged a point per night for Providence while playing the bulk of the campaign in Boston, where he remained before being dealt to Los Angeles as part of the 1997 offseason deal that brought in Byron Dafoe.

            Murray had already claimed a permanent NHL roster spot by the time the P-Bruins were reconvening for their 1993-94 encore. He had scored thirty goals and fifty-six points as an AHL rookie, garnered twenty-three appearances for Boston and never looked back in the fourteen seasons that followed.

            After each playing for the L.A. Kings, Stumpel and Murray returned to Boston in 2001-02, at which point O’Connell was in his second year as the head general manager. Upon reacquiring his two former Providence players early that year, O’Connell watched Murray and Stumpel place fifth and sixth, respectively, on the Bruins scoring leaderboard en route to a first-place finish in the Eastern Conference. Murray’s thirty-five goals were good for second on the team, while Stumpel led all playmakers with forty-seven helpers. The next year, Murray led the club with forty-four goals while Stumpel provided depth with fifty-one points.

 

In exchange for O’Connell’s 1994 transfer to Sinden’s office, Providence was given another former Boston player-turned-assistant coach in Steve Kasper.

            Kasper was O’Connell’s teammate throughout the latter’s playing days in New England. In only his second NHL season, he garnered the 1982 Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward. His last full season with Boston was his most productive, marked by seventy regular-season points and a trip to the 1988 Stanley Cup Final. After skating for five more years with three other organizations, Kasper returned to the Bruins as one of Brian Sutter’s staffers, devoting one year to that role before the personnel shuffle.

            Having made the big club out of training camp as a rookie, Kasper never played in a single minor-league game. His first regular-season appearance in Providence, which came two nights after his thirty-third birthday, would be his first exposure to American League competition. As such, he stood to be as great a learner, if not greater than his new pupils.

            In an article for that season’s Score Magazine, Kasper told the Boston Globe’s Nancy L. Marrapese, “I’m impressed with our players. But it’s tough to judge our talent against what I may be up against. It’s a great unknown to me. Tim Tookey (player/assistant coach) will help me immensely there.”

            To that point, Tookey was just coming off his third separate stint with the Hershey Bears, his latest tenure having lasted five full seasons. In his fifteenth season as a player, he was pouncing on his first chance to get one foot into the coaching realm. As such, he complemented Kasper to the tune of a 39-30-11 run.

Despite dressing for only fifty games, Tookey chipped in forty-four points to help the P-Bruins return to the playoffs. There, he played one more game, his last in competitive hockey, but otherwise focused on collaborating with Kasper on a plan to confront the reigning champion Portland Pirates. Under their counsel, Providence won a back-and-forth thriller in seven games, then pushed the eventual champion Albany River Rats to six games in the division final.

            After Albany’s parent club, the New Jersey Devils, knocked out Boston in the opening round of their 1995 playoffs, the Bruins canned Sutter and promptly promoted Kasper. The move proved premature, as the big-league B’s lost the 1996 conference quarterfinals in five games, then missed the 1997 playoffs upon plunging to the basement of the twenty-six-team NHL. Kasper’s coaching career was over, his only moment of glory coming in Providence.

 

            In Kasper’s place, the P-Bruins tabbed their first coach with no prior black-and-gold affiliation for the 1995-96 season. But unlike Kasper, Bob Francis came in with ample minor-league playing and coaching experience. At the time, he was coming off two seasons with the AHL’s Saint John Flames. He had led their precursor, the IHL’s Salt Lake Golden Eagles, in each of the previous four years.

            And he was still merely thirty-six years of age, not far removed from an archetypal journeyman playing career that had yielded a paltry fourteen NHL games. In Score Magazine, he told the Providence Journal-Bulletin’s Bill Parrillo, in reference to his players, “I went through what they’re going through…All they’re looking for is a chance at a chance.”

            Having relinquished his own playing dreams Tookey-style, namely by gradually transitioning to assistant coaching, in 1987, Francis was undoubtedly chomping at the bit for his own chance at The Show in his new capacity. It was hard to blame him, as he was raised by a legendary NHL skipper in Emile Francis. When Bob was growing up, the elder Francis had coached the New York Rangers for a decade, including the year they lost the 1972 Stanley Cup Final in six games to Bobby Orr’s Boston juggernaut.

A portion of Emile’s tenure in Manhattan had even coincided with the Rangers’ affiliation with the Providence Reds, giving local fans of a certain age an element of nostalgia when the next generation of Francis coaches came to lead the city’s new AHL team.

            In terms of regular-season success, the P-Bruins were unremarkable in Bob Francis’ tenure. They finished fourth out of four in their division in back-to-back years, earning seventy-four and seventy-five points, respectively. With only one team missing the postseason per conference, just getting there was no extravagant achievement in those years.

            But patience paid off in the end when intangibles manifested themselves in the 1997 playoffs. Francis oversaw the P-Bruins’ second postseason series victory of all time in the form of their rally from a 2-0 deficit to upset the first-place IceCats in a best-of-five division semifinal.

His judgment and handling of the goaltending rotation between Scott Bailey and Derek Herlofsky had paid off for the better part of the homestretch en route to the playoff berth. The same held true when Providence improved to 4-0 in elimination games, avoiding a four-game sweep by Springfield before folding in a Game 5 squeaker.

            Six weeks after that bittersweet conclusion, Francis followed his two predecessors to the Boston front office. The Bruins had replaced Kasper with colorful veteran Pat Burns, but were not seeking an all-out organizational upheaval. The Spoked-Ps’ spring performance while the parent club was whimpering out undoubtedly convinced Sinden to give Francis his first NHL job as one of Burns’ assistants.

He would serve in that role for two years, helping Boston get back into the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1998 and win its first series in five years in 1999. That yielded an offer to hold the main job with the Phoenix Coyotes, with whom he would last nearly five seasons and win the 2002 Jack Adams Award.

Unfortunately for Francis, that was the end of his glories. By 2004, he was let go from Phoenix, and would have a short-lived gig in Scandinavia two years later. Otherwise, as the Arizona Republic’s Dan Bickley reported on extensively for USA Today, Francis has devoted the last decade-plus to curtailing and reversing the effects of alcoholism.

 *****

            The fourth P-Bruins coach was the only one in the franchise’s first twenty-five years to end his run on an unfavorable note at the one-year mark. Tom McVie had a respectable resume, featuring fourteen years of head coaching in the minors and eight in the NHL or WHA before three seasons as one of Sutter’s assistants in Boston. At the time of his return to the Bruins as the new Providence skipper in 1997-98, he was coming off a decent 36-29-5 run with the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers.

            But for this author’s money, the absence of youth and relatability was McVie’s downfall. At age sixty-two, and with an Abe Vigoda-like way of looking perpetually mature, he was a stark contrast from the three men in their mid-thirties who preceded him.

Meanwhile, assistant Rod Langway all but presaged Wayne Gretzky’s failure to translate great playing into winning coaching with the Phoenix Coyotes. Even coming out of retirement for ten games on the blue line could not instill a veteran presence the produced results for this team.

            With a 19-49-12 record, McVie’s coaching career was officially dead. Although, he did remain in the game and the Bruins organization as a scout, and all was clearly forgiven in Providence within fifteen years, as he accepted an invitation to serve as the Western Conference team’s honorary captain at the 2013 AHL All-Star Classic.

            Save for the McVie mistake that immediately followed him, Francis’ legacy continued for five years in each of the next three P-Bruins coaches. Peter Laviolette and Bill Armstrong split four seasons on the job after each having played for Francis with the same franchise. When Armstrong was not retained in 2002, newly retired Coyotes player Mike Sullivan, a part of the team Francis had just won the Jack Adams with, got the job in Providence.

            Laviolette, most naturally, got the immediate gratification for himself and his familiar fan base. After he replaced McVie in Wheeling and took the Nailers to the third round of the 1998 ECHL playoffs, the Bruins came calling to fill another McVie void. This would be his third stint with the Spoked-Ps, his first having ended when he spent the 1993-94 campaign as the U.S. Olympic team’s captain on its tune-up tour en route to Lillehammer. As it happened, that season and 1997-98 were the only two out of the first six in which the P-Bruins missed the postseason.

            Hmmm, could it have been because of his absence?

            This much was certain. In 1992-93, Laviolette came along and captained the P-Bruins on their rise from the moribund Maine Mariners to the first-place finishers in the AHL’s Northern Division. When he came back from the Olympics and assumed an alternate captaincy, he helped the team end its brief absence from the playoffs and claim its first series victory over the reigning champion Pirates. In his final year of playing and the start of his transition into coaching, he helped them derail the first-place IceCats in three straight elimination games.

Now another revival was in order, both on and around the ice. At his introductory press conference, Laviolette pledged nothing less. Years later, then-Providence radio broadcaster Dave Goucher recalled processing the old friend and new coach’s vows in an interview with Brendan McGair of the Pawtucket Times.

            “That press conference,” Goucher told McGair, “he talked about winning a Calder Cup. I remember thinking to myself, ‘This doesn’t sound normal. Is he aware of what happened last year?’ Peter wasn’t a part of that and wanted to set the bar real high right off the bat. What he was saying is that we expect to have success here.”

            Of anybody who had directly participated in the P-Bruins’ affairs for their first six seasons, Laviolette was a logical candidate to crave excellence for the brand. Besides being the team’s first captain and relishing all of its smaller moments of glory up to that time, he held the franchise record with 252 regular-season games played. He had also dressed for all of their playoff games in 1993, 1995 and 1996, then acted as Francis’ assistant for the 1997 run.

            Laviolette’s love affair with the Spoked-P emblem and everything it stood for was easy fuel for his agenda. He would still not turn thirty-four until after the twenty-fifth game of the 1998-99 season, making him the second-youngest Providence coach of all time. And like his last mentor Francis, he had enjoyed negligible NHL action as a player, seeing action in twelve games for the Rangers.

            That same element of relatability for the individuals, combined with his ardent desire for team success at the AHL level, equaled a culture of serious fun. Amplifying that attitude was new assistant. Armstrong, a former teammate in 1994-95 and 1996-97 who played six games early in the fall of 1998 before turning exclusively to coaching. At the time, Armstrong was third on the P-Bruins’ all-time career games leaderboard with 223. He was also a fan favorite for his scrappy style, which amounted to a franchise-high 688 penalty minutes.

            Translation: Laviolette and Armstrong both knew the Civic Center, its dynamics, its atmosphere and its surrounding culture better than anyone. When they plugged that peerless knowledge in with the rest of their leadership credentials, the product was better than any of the P-Bruins’ first six installments combined.

            Those variables were already plenty to get a head start on gelling a fairly ruffled roster from the year prior. It also helped that the new Providence regulars included Jeremy Brown and Marquis Mathieu, two of the top producers on Laviolette’s Wheeling team.

            With its new makeup, Providence went from an all-time low fifty regular-season points to an all-time AHL record of 120. Its offensive output over the eighty-game slate was its most prolific since the inaugural season. Its defense was at its most efficient (little surprise given that Laviolette and Armstrong were both former blueliners).

            Once its core was in a rhythm shortly after the first quarter of the regular season, there was no turning back for this 1998-99 team. It never slowed down and never submitted to temptation for complacency, especially when a milestone was within reach. That, too, was a credit to the youthful energy behind the bench between Laviolette and Armstrong, who only turned twenty-nine on May 18, 1999.

            By the time of Armstrong’s birthday, the P-Bruins had matched the aggregate accomplishment of their six predecessors by winning two playoff rounds. They were now on their way to dispatching the desperate Fredericton Canadiens for their first Calder Cup Final bid, then repressing the Rochester Americans for the title.

            With that, Laviolette had captained the P-Bruins to their first division title and now coached them to their second, along with their first regular-season, playoff conference and playoff league crowns. He surprised no one by laying hands on the Louis A.R. Pieri Award as the AHL’s coach of the year.

            The way the 1999-00 season unfolded, one could have made a credible case for a Pieri prize repeat. Statistically, the defending champions crumbled, barely securing another Calder Cup playoff passport with a Francis-like finish of 33-38-9.

In what was still a nine-team Eastern Conference, that record was good for fifth in the New England Division and a crossover to the Atlantic Division playoff bracket. The Bruins had finished with seventy-five points, seventeen above the dreadful St. John’s Maple Leafs, for the eighth and final spot in the conference.

            But consider the context of that regular season. Both the Providence and Boston Bruins (who ultimately missed their postseason) were ravaged by an incessant injury bug. The latter meant Providence was sending reinforcements up north on a more rapid basis than normal. The Baby B’s started their title defense well enough at 5-0-1, and were a season-best six games above .500 after a 3-2 win over Worcester on December 3.

            But by mid-February, the uncontrolled circumstances had caught up to Laviolette’s cabinet. The last full weekend of March was Providence’s last above the .500 mark, and an eight-game losing streak ended in the season finale with a 2-1 overtime escape against Hartford. By that point, the Bruins had set yet another league record by dressing seventy different players over their eighty-game slate. Thirty-four of those men saw action in eight games or fewer. Twenty-five of them made five appearances or fewer.

            The lack of continuity, however, could not kill their will to reignite their title defense when the “second season” arrived. Boston’s tempest was over, and leaned-on regulars such as John Grahame, Brandon Smith, Peter Ferraro, Antti Laaksonen, Eric Manlow, Cameron Mann and Andre Savage were available to focus solely on the Calder Cup repeat bid.

            With sweeps of the Quebec Citadelles and Lowell Lock Monsters, Laviolette’s team confirmed the unreliable nature of fall and winter transcripts. And even when they fell from ahead to lose the Eastern Conference final to Hartford, there was little shame in bowing to the top dog and eventual champion. Sure, there was some shame in failing to close the deal on three straight opportunities. But the plus points of the season’s defining stages outnumbered the setbacks.

            On the heels of those two deep playoff runs under starkly contrasting expectations going in, Laviolette became the fourth P-Bruins coach to garner a new gig with the parent club. He would fill a spot Francis once held as an assistant to Burns. At the time of the hiring, Burns told the Associated Press of his new sidekick, “He’s good head coaching material as soon as he gets up and gains that experience. He’s going to learn quickly and he’ll have a couple of experienced people to help him along.”

He served under Burns in the early stages of 2000-01, then survived the main man’s firing to continue working under Mike Keenan. When Keenan himself was canned at season’s end, rather than elevate Laviolette, Boston turned to a more seasoned import in Robbie Ftorek.

In turn, Laviolette accepted an offer from the New York Islanders and began to employ his old turnaround touch in The Show. His first year on Long Island yielded the franchise’s first playoff berth in eight years, dating back to the legendary Al Arbour’s retirement and with six failed coaching changes in between. Under Laviolette, the Islanders pushed the experienced Pat Quinn and the Toronto Maple Leafs to seven games in the first round.

A second straight opening-round exit in 2003 was enough for New York management to pursue a change in personnel. But Laviolette landed on his feet later that calendar year as a midseason replacement for Paul Maurice in Carolina (home of the former Whalers).

On the other side of the infamous 2004-05 lockout, his first full season with the Hurricanes yielded more than the team’s first playoff run in four years. It brought him a return to the Olympics as the head of Team USA’s coaching staff, followed by Carolina’s return to the Stanley Cup Final after its 2002 loss to Detroit. This run culminated in a 3-1 Game 7 home victory over Edmonton.

Still only forty-one years of age at the time, Laviolette was likely leaving Bruins fans who knew him well from Rhode Island and beyond what could have been. Those what-ifs rubbed in deeper when, as another midseason replacement in Philadelphia, he took the Flyers on a surprise run to the 2010 final. Along the way, that team made history at Boston’s expense by surmounting a 3-0 series deficit and 3-0 pothole in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. (Granted, Claude Julien and company earned quick redemption by sweeping Laviolette’s Flyers at the same stage of the 2011 playoffs, which ended with New England’s long-awaited reunion with Lord Stanley.)

Per the modern laws of sports business nature, Laviolette has had almost as many setbacks in his NHL coaching annals as he has had triumphs. But his own bounce-back tendencies keep letting him rekindle the knack for reinvigorating a team that began in Providence. The latest example started taking shape in the summer of 2014 when the Nashville Predators tabbed him to replace Barry Trotz, the franchise’s only coach in its first sixteen years of existence.

At the time, the Preds were coming off back-to-back non-playoff runs, their first pair of its kind in a decade. Enter Laviolette, who orchestrated a nine-win, sixteen-point turnaround in 2014-15. Subsequent growing pains came in a six-game, first-round loss to the dynastic Chicago Blackhawks, who proceeded to claim their third Stanley Cup in six years. But two of Nashville’s four losses in that series required overtime.

Laviolette’s second year in the Tennessee capital bore a few shades of his second year as the head coach in the Rhode Island capital. Finishing fourth in their division, the Predators crossed over from the Central Division to the Pacific for the first two rounds of the 2016 playoffs. There, they cemented their improvement by upsetting the top-seeded Anaheim Ducks in seven games. The Ducks were led by none other than Bruce Boudreau, whose Lock Monsters had suffered a sweep by Laviolette’s Baby B’s sixteen years prior.

A similar transcript in the 2016-17 regular season gave way to a revolutionary playoff run. The Preds shocked the top-dog Blackhawks in a sweep, edged the St. Louis Blues in six, then won their first-ever conference final by bumping the Ducks in six games. Like the 2010 Flyers before them, Laviolette’s latest Cinderella class met midnight before champagne could be served, losing the Cup to Pittsburgh. But just like his last year in Providence, the depth and length of his run, combined with who halted it, left little cause for frustration.

 *****

For at least one year, on the surface, it looked like a simple passing of the baton from Laviolette to Armstrong would pay effortless dividends in Providence. Armstrong carried many of the same basic credentials as his predecessor and de facto mentor, with whom he had just shared the franchise’s first two rides to the latter half of the postseason.

And when the 2000-01 regular season began to mirror its predecessor, Armstrong and his veteran core handled the tempest the same way. With contributions from forty-three different players, including seven goalies who played no more than twenty-six games apiece, the P-Bruins improved on their previous finish by two wins, nine points and one playoff seed.

In that postseason, they again reached the conference final despite lacking home ice in every series. And they would again fall to the eventual champion, the Saint John Flames, albeit in a mere five games and after falling behind, 3-0, in the series. Add the fact that, whereas Providence swept its first two sets in 2000, it needed a rubber game to finish off Hartford and Worcester in 2001.

The 2001-02 season brought substantial change to the team and the league. Every player from the 1999 championship was suddenly gone from Providence. Meanwhile, with the IHL having folded the preceding summer, the AHL grew from twenty teams to twenty-seven, transforming from four divisions to six in the process.

That, along with a new format that included a best-of-three qualifying round for each conference’s seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth seeds, made the quest for a tournament passport more challenging than before.

With a repeat thirty-five win performance, the P-Bruins took third in the Eastern Division and tenth in the Eastern Conference. Facing the seventh-seeded St. John’s Maple Leafs at neutral sites in Toronto and Brampton, Ontario, they lost a 3-1 and 4-1 decision. In the wake of that thud from the heavenly years of Cup contention, Armstrong was left to drift off when his contract expired.

Prior to the 2001 playoffs, which started with the reigning champion Wolf Pack at hand, Armstrong told the Providence Journal he could bank on a winning effort, “Just by the personnel in our locker room,” elaborating that the core group was stocked with certified winners. Nine days later, told the same outlet, “You don’t win three games in a row against the defending Calder Cup champs if you don’t have the character people like we have.”

            That notion may have worked against him a year later. In the spring of 2001, the P-Bruins still had John Grahame in their net at that point. They still had all-round talent Brandon Smith anchoring the blue line. They still had Jeremy Brown, Peter Ferraro, Marquis Mathieu, Eric Nickulas and Andre Savage up front.

            All seven of those holdovers from the 1999 banner year would key Providence to its third straight Eastern Conference final. But by the next fall, they were all either permanently promoted to Boston or had dispersed to other organizations. For his season year as head coach, Armstrong was the last ice-level remnant from the championship with any control. Another key loss was Nick Boynton, the team’s 1999-00 rookie of the year and 2000-01 defenseman of the year, who made Boston out of training camp and was never reassigned again for the balance of his Bruins tenure.

Regardless, the franchise had established a rigid precedent of withholding judgment until the playoffs. And for the first time since they missed outright in 1998, the Baby B’s had failed to make so much as a splash on that stage.

            Armstrong would spend two more seasons in the coaching ranks with the ECHL’s Trenton Titans. But beyond the epic takedowns of Hartford and Worcester in 2001, he never won another playoff series. He has long since found greater career stability as a scout.

 *****

            Despite passively ousting Armstrong, the Bruins retained his two-year assistant, Scott Gordon, and gave him a new mentor in the newly retired NHL veteran Mike Sullivan. Thirty-four years old at the time of his career change, Sullivan was a defensive-minded center with ample New England credentials. The Marshfield, Massachusetts native had played under Jack Parker at Boston University and later spent the 1997-98 season with Burns, Francis and the Bruins.

            With all of the plus points and drawbacks to his background, including an utter lack of familiarity with the AHL, Sullivan had the potential to become Providence’s second coming of Kasper. Based on everything the first ten years of the franchise had yielded, that was the best precedent for a balance between optimism and realism.

            The expectations, however, did not take long to intensify as the 2002-03 P-Bruins took shape. They won each of their last six games before their five-day Christmas break, shooting from three to nine games above .500 in the process. Upon their return, they tied the Wolf Pack, 4-4, then won another five games in a row. After a loss in Portland, they put together another six-game victory streak, equaling a 16-1-1 tear. They nabbed another five consecutive wins in February and only lost twice in a row once down the stretch.

            With a 4-1 takedown of the host Portland Pirates on March 8, Providence ensured its first forty-win season since 1998-99 and third in franchise history. By the end of the month, it had secured its third-ever regular-season division title. In between, with Robbie Ftorek fired from Boston, Sullivan was promoted as an assistant to interim coach (and now third-year GM) Mike O’Connell. The reins went to Gordon for the homestretch, and though the Manitoba Moose pulled a 1992-93 Springfield Indians by winning the best-of-five first-round set, 3-1, both P-Bruins coaches had a promotion on the horizon.

            In the end, Sullivan’s narrative with the Bruins did, in fact, mirror Kasper’s. Though his general inexperience as a coach did not matter in his endeavor to reignite the Providence team, he was promoted to the same post in Boston much too soon after one AHL campaign. The Spoked-Bs deceptively finished first in the Northeast Division, then blew a 3-1 lead and lost to Claude Julien’s Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the 2004 playoffs.

On the other side of the lockout, O’Connell helped to hasten his own ouster by trading Joe Thornton and Sergei Samsonov. After Boston finished its 2006 playoff no-show, Sullivan — who that February had traveled to Turin to work with Laviolette on the Olympic team — soon followed O’Connell to the egress.

            Like Laviolette, the first Bay State native to guide the P-Bruins, Sullivan would ultimately find success in The Show with other organizations after he had time to grow and mature. Stints as an assistant with the Lightning, Rangers and Canucks yielded another AHL head-coaching job with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins to start the 2015-16 season. That gig lasted all of twenty-four games before he was promoted to replace Mike Johnston in Pittsburgh. The Pens went 33-16-5 for the rest of the regular season, then won the Stanley Cup over Thornton’s San Jose Sharks, four games to two.

            When the aforementioned Laviolette-led Predators met their match in 2017, it was Sullivan orchestrating Pittsburgh’s repeat, the first pair of back-to-back Stanley Cup victories since 1997-98. And it happened after a series pitting two head coaches who had won their first respective regular-season division titles at any level as first-year bench bosses of the Providence Bruins.

 *****

            With Sullivan’s promotion to Boston in 2003, the forty-year-old Gordon got his long-awaited, hard-earned break. By that time, he had logged eight years in lower coaching ranks, including the last three as the assistant in Providence. His head-coaching resume included a run to overtime in Game 7 of the ECHL’s 1999 Kelly Cup Final and a second-round run the next spring with the Roanoke Express.

            Hailing from Brockton, Massachusetts, Gordon was the third New Englander out of the first eight P-Bruins skippers. His eight-year playing career consisted of only twenty-three NHL twirls with the Quebec Nordiques. He knew the region and the ranks well enough even before he got to know the organization while working under Armstrong and Sullivan.

            Once he started building on those credentials, the results would translate to the longest coaching tenure in team history. If you count the portion where he filled in for Sullivan, Gordon coached 409 regular-season games for Providence. In each of his five full seasons on the job, he oversaw a playoff run in his own right and would win four out of nine total series.

            As noted in a prior chapter, in the section on the Portland rivalry, the Pirates of 2004 and 2006 were all that kept the Bruins from advancing at least one round in every year of Gordon’s tenure. His second full campaign was the most impressive, as the B’s finished fourth in the Atlantic Division, but upset Manchester and Lowell in succession. Fronted by Andy Hilbert, Brad Boyes and Patrice Bergeron and backstopped by Hannu Toivonen, they gave the stockpiled Philadelphia Phantoms a sweaty run in the conference final. They were finally ousted by the eventual Calder Cup champions in Game 6.

            By 2006, Gordon had completed an unprecedented third year as the Providence foreman. Despite a first-round falter to the Portland nemesis that spring, higher-ups let him extend his record reign. It was therefore no surprise when, that following fall, Patrick Williams of Slam! Sports got Gordon to sum up the organization’s philosophy. The coach’s response: “Being hard to play against, being a team that is relentless on its pursuit of the puck, and if you do those things, you’re going to keep teams on their heels.”

            By season’s end, Gordon had won another playoff round, upsetting Hartford in seven games. Up in Boston, the parent club was coming off back-to-back postseason miss-outs and nearing its second coaching change in as many years. Sullivan had given way to Dave Lewis, the first bench boss hired and fired by O’Connell’s successor as general manager, Peter Chiarelli.

            Amidst all of these happenings, one could not have been blamed to speculate if, by 2007, Gordon’s time had come for a shot at The Show. In fact, in another column that spring, Williams declared as much, bestowing upon Gordon his unofficial “Peter Laviolette Award” as the most NHL-ready coach in the minors.

            “The young, affable, intense and intelligent former pro goaltender has paid his dues over seven seasons with the P-Bruins,” Williams wrote. “Short of winning a Calder Cup (and Gordon piloted the overmatched Bruins to within two wins of the Calder Cup final in 2005), the Massachusetts-born Gordon has done everything that can be done in the AHL. Gordon is ready to make the move to the NHL.”

            He did not make the move that year. Chiarelli imported Claude Julien, a recent discard from New Jersey by Lou Lamoriello. Within four years, the move proved optimal for obvious reasons. But while Julien took Boston through its baby steps back to respectability, Gordon stayed put on the farm in 2007-08. All he did that year was direct the P-Bruins to their fourth first-place finish in their division and first regular-season title since 1999.

Perhaps the most impressive part of that run was the team’s 8-1-1 start through ten consecutive road games, as renovations to the Dunkin Donuts Center pushed the home opener off to November 14. Providence lost only three pairs of consecutive regulation decisions, and had only one winless skid last longer than two games that regular season.

            A second straight second-round flameout in the Calder Cup playoffs did not put a damper on Gordon’s credentials. While Julien earned his keep in Boston upon nearly upsetting Montreal in what would have been a full-on reversal from 2004, there were NHL vacancies elsewhere. The New York Islanders came calling for Gordon, and he accepted.

            He would only last two-plus years, though. Since then, he has spent three years as a Maple Leafs assistant and two back in the AHL with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. Going into the 2017-18 campaign, the P-Bruins’ first-round sweep of the Manchester Monarchs in 2008 remains Gordon’s most recent win in a playoff series.

            In this sense, Gordon has not come close to matching the post-Providence fulfillment Laviolette and Sullivan have experienced. He could, however, still follow Sullivan’s trajectory by parlaying his return to the AHL to a second crack at The Show. Come what may, while he also did not generate the same glory Laviolette did for the P-Bruins, as Patrick Williams aptly noted, he did help cultivate key crops of homegrown talent that helped Boston to its 2011 Stanley Cup championship.

The team MVP in Gordon’s first year as the Providence head coach was a fellow journeyman goaltender by the name of Tim Thomas. Originally drafted by the Quebec Nordiques, the same team that employed Gordon for his short-lived NHL netminding career, Thomas made Providence his fifth and final North American stop in the minors. The 2003-04 season, his third in the Bruins system and second with the Baby B’s saw him post a franchise single-season record nine shutouts while retaining a 1.84 goals-against average and .941 save percentage in forty-three appearances.

After spending the 2004-05 NHL lockout in Finland, Thomas returned stateside and split the next season between Boston and Providence. Besides thirty-eight appearances in The Show that year, the late-bloomer played for the PlanetUSA All-Stars as his final AHL highlight. By the subsequent training camp, he had graduated from Gordon’s capstone class and became one of the few bright spots in a dismal 2006-07 season under Dave Lewis.

When Julien came in and sparked the Spoked-B resurgence, Thomas proceeded to claim the 2009 and 2011 Vezina Trophies, a share of the 2009 Jennings Trophy for the league’s best GAA, plus the 2011 Conn Smythe Trophy after blanking Vancouver, 4-0, in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

When Thomas was on his last overseas stint during the season-long lockout, Patrice Bergeron played for Providence in the third year of Gordon’s reign. The playmaking prodigy posted forty assists and sixty-one points in sixty-eight regular-season appearances, interrupting it to represent Team Canada at the World Junior Championship.

Bergeron would return to The Show when the top league resumed business, assumed an alternate captaincy and emerged as a bona fide two-way connoisseur. He scored the icebreaker (which proved the game-winner) in the 2011 championship clincher, added a shorthanded tally and assisted on two other doses of insurance. A year later, he claimed his first Selke Trophy, making him the first Bruin to win it since Kasper.

The first season of Gordon’s reign without Thomas or Bergeron was highlighted by the arrival of rookie center David Krejci. One-third of the “Special K” troika, opposite Petr Kalus and Martins Karsums, he posted seventy-four regular-season and a leading sixteen playoff points for the Baby B’s in 2006-07.

Krejci made twenty-five more productive appearances early in Gordon’s fifth and final year with the organization before claiming his permanent position in Boston. By 2011, he and Bergeron constituted Julien’s top two centers, and Krejci, anchoring a formidable first line with power wingers Nathan Horton and Milan Lucic, led all Stanley Cup playoff point-getters with twenty-three. He did so again on another run to the final with twenty-six points in 2013.

And so, while Gordon did indeed, in Williams’ words, fall “short of winning a Calder Cup” for Providence, his time there later proved indirectly instrumental in honing a Stanley Cup-winning team for Boston.

 *****

            Rob Murray’s narrative as the Providence head coach more or less replicated Armstrong’s. Upon abandoning his distinguished minor-league playing career in 2003, the former Springfield Falcons captain took Gordon’s old spot as the Baby B’s assistant. He remained in that capacity for the next five years, after which an implicit craving for continuity throughout the revamped Boston organization prompted his promotion.

            And like Armstrong eight years before him, Murray started by reaching the neighborhood of the standard his predecessor had left. The P-Bruins dropped off by twenty-three points from the year prior, but were safely in postseason contention.

That was where the interest truly sat. Everyone wanted to see what second-year goalie Tuukka Rask and the rest of the returnees would do for their follow-up on 2008. They wanted to see what newcomers Brad Marchand, Andrew Bodnarchuk, top scorer Martin St. Pierre and Eddie Shore Award-winning defenseman Johnny Boychuk would add after making individual impressions in the regular season.

            Murray, along with new sidekick Bruce Cassidy, got that core to avenge its previous playoff loss to Portland in the first round. Another rivalry renewal with Worcester likewise ended in triumph, yielding the team’s first conference final in four years. But after stealing Game 1 from Hershey’s Giant Center, the B’s fell flat to the Bears, who went on to their third Calder Cup Final and second championship in four years.

            By the time Murray’s 2009-10 team was taking shape, Boychuk and Rask were both in Boston on a permanent basis. Marchand and stay-at-home blueliner Adam McQuaid soon followed, as did veteran forward Vladimir Sobotka. Prolonged key injuries in Boston did not help matters, but neither did the stalled developments of touted prospects such as Zach Hamill and Jamie Arniel.

Not even the reinsertion of veteran captain Trent Whitfield could remedy a year’s worth of inconsistency. The result was Providence’s first losing record in ten years and its first finish out of the playoff picture in twelve.

            Murray got a mulligan for 2010-11. With it came the understood impetus to make the likes of Arniel and Hamill NHL-ready amidst the simulation of a winning culture. New faces Matt Bartkowsi, Jordan Caron and Max Sauve joined that crop of young prospects. But an injury to Whitfield exacerbated an ongoing inconsistency throughout the fall.

            The 2010-11 P-Bruins would attain only one winning streak lasting longer than three games. The third and fourth installment of that streak both required a shootout to complete. Another pair of shootout victories helped stop the bleeding after their season-worst seven-game pointless skid.

Arniel led the team with a meager twenty-three goals and fifty points, Hamill with thirty-four assists. The latter prospect — Boston’s first-round draft choice at seventh overall in 2007 — scored a mere nine goals, in part because, on numerous occasions, he looked for a pass when a shot was the better bet.

            Whitfield’s midseason return would help to a degree. He would tally forty-two points in forty-five appearances, and the team went from four games below .500 on January 14 to two games above by season’s end. In addition, goaltender Anton Khudobin came from the Minnesota Wild organization in early March and went 9-4-1 with a .920 save percentage in sixteen appearances.

Khudobin and Whitfield were singled out for applause by a crowd of 9,550 upon finishing the season on a three-game winning streak. They then joined other P-Bruins as Black Aces on Boston’s playoff run, even taking part in the victory lap with the Stanley Cup.

            Assistant coach Bruce “Butch” Cassidy had taken charge of that taxi squad, because the late perk-up did not suffice to salvage Murray’s tenure. He was let go in the wake of the first-ever set of back-to-back playoff no-shows in Providence Bruins history.

            With the definitive success at the top level, though, the organization clearly decided not much change was needed in the pipeline. Within days of clinching the Cup, the B’s finished a formality by elevating Cassidy to the main post in Providence.

 *****

            Granted, Cassidy’s nickname is too easy, and maybe even a little cheesy. But besides its loose similarity to his actual five-letter first name, it fits in a cute way given his career path. After all, the real Butch Cassidy was played in the cinema by Paul Newman, who was also the seasoned minor-league hockey coach Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot. Cassidy came to his Providence post in 2011 with more seasoning than the majority of his predecessors.

With his three years of working under Murray, Cassidy was the fifth P-Bruins coach to previously serve as the team’s assistant. But while not nearly as mature as McVie, he shared two common threads with the 1997-98 one-year blunder. He had prior head-coaching experience in the NHL, namely one year and a portion of another with the Washington Capitals. He had also won a Louis A.R. Pieri Award for another AHL team, doing so with the Grand Rapids Griffins in 2001-02. The year prior, the final season of the IHL, he had guided Grand Rapids to the league’s best regular-season record.

            But after those impressive years in the minors, Cassidy had lived a hard-luck chronicle on his road back to the AHL. He had been fired from his job in Washington and from another with the Kingston Frontenacs major-junior team before becoming Murray’s assistant. With the Bruins’ decision to keep and promote him after parting with Murray, Providence would spell his chance to earn a second crack at The Show.

            The start was hardly auspicious. By the end of November of 2011, Cassidy’s club was 8-13-2, with only half of those wins coming in regulation. One came in overtime, while another three required a shootout to finish. This meant that, if this had been any season prior to 2004-05, the P-Bruins would have actually been 5-13-5. At the quarter mark, that pace was teetering around the same line as the 1997-98 sinkhole.

            By season’s end, Providence had improved on that 8-13-2 start to a final record of 35-34-7, but still missed the postseason for the third consecutive year. Thanks in part to that gradual improvement and the desire for continuity throughout the organization, Cassidy stuck for the 2012-13 campaign that began with an NHL lockout.

The result was an influx of new blood that ostensibly could have challenged for a Boston roster spot had training camp occurred in its normal time frame. Veteran Chris Bourque, acquired from Washington, and touted draft picks Jared Knight and Ryan Spooner were the most magnetic new faces for attention up front. On the backend, Torey Krug was embarking on his first full pro season after making two late-season appearances in Boston upon signing out of Michigan State as a free agent.

            Spooner, one of twenty skaters to crack double-digit points on the year, would lead the club with fifty-seven points. Krug led the blue line with forty-five, and was ultimately summoned back to The Show for what would become a permanent stay during the second round of the playoffs. And yes, both Bruins teams made that stage in 2013, as the gradual improvement in Providence’s win column carried over from the previous winter and amounted to the franchise’s third-ever MacGregor Kilpatrick Trophy as regular-season champions.

            But just as Bob Francis had fits with the Falcons and Scott Gordon had problems with the Pirates, Cassidy would meet his own nemesis in the postseason. The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins cut off the bid for a 2013 Calder Cup title by turning a 3-0 series deficit into a 4-3 series victory in the second round. They would beat the Bruins at the same point in the 2014 playoffs with another Game 7 triumph to cap a more back-and-forth series. When the squads met again in 2016, the Pens swept a best-of-five Atlantic Division semifinal with three consecutive overtime victories.

            Despite his resultant failure to get the franchise into the latter half of the playoffs, Cassidy was a keeper in Boston’s coaching pipeline. Besides Krug and Spooner, he had prepared Anton Khudobin, Kevan Miller, Joe Morrow, David Pastrnak, Niklas Svedberg and Frank Vatrano for regular roles on Julien’s roster. Although, it would not remain Julien’s roster for long.

            By the start of the 2016-17 season, Cassidy had been elevated to fill a vacancy as one of Julien’s assistants. Coming off two straight Stanley Cup playoff no-shows, Julien was on an implicit hot seat, and it finally burned after fifty-five games. With Julien fired, the Bruins simply bumped Cassidy into the open head-coaching position, which he used for a late 18-8-1 rush to third place in the Atlantic Division.

Boston would lose its first-round series in six games to Ottawa (ironically the former affiliate of Grand Rapids from when Cassidy was coaching the Griffins), but made a crucial stride just by getting there. In addition, key contributors to that playoff participation revival included Krug, Pastrnak and Spooner, plus leading scorer Brad Marchand, defenseman Adam McQuaid and the goaltending tandem of Tuukka Rask and Khudobin. All of those players knew Cassidy from his time as an assistant or head coach in Providence.

            Meantime, upon Cassidy’s move from the Ocean State to the Bay State, the Baby B’s started their twenty-fifth season by renewing a pattern of succession that had started with the Sullivan-Gordon ticket in 2003. Once again, they promoted their assistant, Kevin Dean, to the top position.

Dean, a University of New Hampshire graduate, had an eleven-year rollercoaster of a professional playing career. His biggest highlight was winning the 1995 Calder Cup under Robbie Ftorek with Albany (knocking off the P-Bruins along the way), then the Stanley Cup with New Jersey a month later.

As a coach, Dean had logged four years as an assistant with the Lowell Devils, then one as head coach of the ECHL’s Trenton Devils before Providence tabbed him to assist Cassidy. With his eventual break, he proceeded to continue what Cassidy had started, playoffs-wise, by guiding the franchise to its first conference final in eight years.

            Dean has since been reunited with Cassidy in the Hub. There, they will try to build on another foundation and make Cassidy the first former P-Bruins coach to win a playoff series on Boston’s behalf.

            Meanwhile, familiar face Jay Leach, who had joined Trent Whitfield as an assistant on Dean’s staff in 2016-17, will step in as the twelfth head coach in AHL Bruins history. He will be the third among that dozen, and the first since Bill Armstrong, to have previously skated for the Spoked-Ps. And as a former journeyman not too far removed from a twelve-year playing career, and given that he will be thirty-eight on opening night, he represents a throwback to the majority of the Providence bench bosses of the nineties and the turn of the century.

            Like Laviolette circa 1998, Leach has limited coaching experience so far, but boasts a lengthy track record of leadership between his college and professional playing days. Like Armstrong, he caught the attention of plenty of Providence fans (both Friars and Bruins) through a hard-nosed style of play that translated to piles of penalty minutes. But like both, he was a capable contributor, if sometimes unsung as a defensive defenseman. And he knows the league, local culture and environs from prior experience as both a player and assistant coach.

            With those credentials, a key participant in portions of the P-Bruins’ first twenty-five years will start a new chapter in his career whilst leading the team into its next quarter-century.