‘It’s been a long climb back’
Different people go into coaching for different reasons. A lot of times, it’s a case of being able to see the game better than playing it. But for Bruce Cassidy, known to all as “Butch,” and now the interim head coach of the Boston Bruins, his career path was chosen by his two ravaged knees. The 51-year-old Cassidy — raised in Ottawa along with his older brother, Steve, by parents Leonard and Louise — had been drafted in the first round by the Chicago Blackhawks (18th overall) and already had one game under his belt when his life’s course was altered. He was going to be an NHL regular defenseman, perhaps even a star, as his 111-point season with the Ottawa 67s hinted at. Those lofty dreams all started to unravel when he was 19 and playing, of all things, ball hockey. “It was with the permission of the Blackhawks. It was a non-contact type of summer league and I got hit from behind, like a clip almost. So I tore my ACL. Shredded it,” said Cassidy.
According to Cassidy, the doctor for the junior team wanted to operate, the doctor for the Blackhawks wanted him to go the rehab route. The Blackhawks were about to start paying him to play the game he loved since he was firing pucks at his brother in the street. There wasn’t really a choice.
He would play a couple of years through pain and a lack of strength before eventually getting the knee fixed, but by then his star had dimmed quite a bit. His peaked development years were wasted. In a few years, he would go from being a Grade A prospect to being the veteran guy the organization paired with those Grade A prospects.
Cassidy never plays the what-if game in his head any more.
“It would be a wasted exercise in the end,” said Cassidy. “And if you want to look at it philosophically, it’s probably what got me into coaching. If I had a better hockey career, I probably wouldn’t have drifted towards coaching. Those guys don’t have to. They can retire and invest their money well. But the injury led me into coaching.”
So it was that fateful knee injury over 30 years ago that steered him into coaching, a profession in which he enjoyed a near-meteoric rise, a stunning fall and a long, slow climb back to be the coach of the team he grew up rooting for after receiving a pair of black-and-gold skates as a kid.
The next step
Cassidy didn’t get the idea of coaching in his head until he was near the end of his playing career. After three years playing in Europe, he returned to the States to be an unofficial player-coach under Duane Sutter with Chicago’s IHL affiliate in Indianapolis. He promptly blew out his other knee and found himself behind the bench in a suit.
“That’s when I realized that there’s something to this,” said Cassidy. “It’s the next best thing to playing. You’re right there, the intensity level is there, you’re involved in the strategy that you associated with playing. That’s when I got the bug.”
When his playing days were done, he went right into coaching. He did two years in the ECHL (Jacksonville), one in the IHL (Indianapolis) another in the ECHL (Trenton) and two with the Ottawa Senators’ top affiliate in Grand Rapids, Mich. He’d gotten his teams into the playoffs for four straight years and started to garner attention when Washington Capitals general manager George McPhee made Cassidy an NHL head coach at the age of 36.
“Our pro scouts had identified him as a coach who’d done very well in the minors with different kinds of teams and different kinds of structures, so he came in for an interview and he did well,” said McPhee, now the GM of the expansion Vegas Golden Knights. “We gave him the job and he did very well his first year.”
The Caps made the playoffs in Cassidy’s first year, bowing out in the first round. But after a terrible start, Cassidy was fired after 25 games of the 2003-04 season, the one before the lost lockout year.
“His second year, we were in the process of changing our roster in preparation for the upcoming CBA, and I don’t think it was fair to Butch, to be honest,” said McPhee, who would trade Jaromir Jagr, Robert Lang, Peter Bondra and Sergei Gonchar, among others, before the season was over.
But after Cassidy was sacked, there were some unflattering stories about his short tenure. One Washington Post piece painted Cassidy as being both unprepared and insensitive to players’ personal issues. McPhee didn’t address any specific issue, but said, “We had some guys on that team who were high maintenance. And it’s amazing, once they got moved, how quiet things got.”
But Cassidy took his share of the blame.
“It happened such a long time ago, that some of that I’ve forgotten — some of the little things that came up that I thought were outside, minutiae type of things, that I think got overblown, personally, but everyone has their opinion,” said Cassidy. “But at the end of the day, what I took from it was that the communication level with the players was important, as was how you conducted yourself on the bench. These were NHL players. I was a fiery guy, used to motivating players, so there’s a different approach in how you do that.
“That’s probably the biggest thing I took. The composure versus passion at the two levels. It’s a different type of player you’re coaching. You have to realize that.”
A steady return
As he’d done all his life — be it delivering newspapers, working construction or leading summer camps — Cassidy went back to work. After the lockout, he was an assistant with the Blackhawks for a year before taking on a new challenge of coaching junior hockey with the Kingston Frontenacs. That ended early in his second season after a disagreement with ownership over the culture of the team.
And so he was out of work and, for the first time, he didn’t run to the next job. He took the rest of the winter off to assess things and, when the job as an assistant coach with the Providence Bruins came up, he put his name in for it.
In the Bruins organization, there was a familiar face who was doing the hiring. Like Cassidy, former GM Peter Chiarelli was an Ottawa boy. They not only played hockey and baseball against each other as kids, but worked together in the Senators’ organization.
Like McPhee, Chiarelli was impressed with what Cassidy was able to do in his minor league jobs, being resourceful while dealing