Mass. appeal in finals is twofold
The Bruins’ season has been over for more than a month now, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be plenty of local rooting interest in the Stanley Cup finals.
Marshfield’s Mike Sullivan and Franklin’s Peter Laviolette, born four years apart in the 1960s in a region consumed by Bobby Orr and the “Big, Bad Bruins,” will be going headto-head in the finals as both coaches will be seeking the second Cup for their resumes. They are unquestionably two of the finest minds in the game, and have traveled a long road to get here.
Both men got their starts in the Bruins organization, of course, with both of their careers with the club coming to a premature end.
After one successful season in Wheeling of the ECHL, Laviolette coached the Providence Bruins to their last Calder Cup victory in 1999 and seemed destined to take over behind the Bruins bench some day. But when it appeared to be his turn following Mike Keenan’s one season in 2001, then-GM Mike O’Connell surprised everyone by deciding to go outside the organization and hire Robbie Ftorek.
It turned out to be a major mistake, as Ftorek would not last two seasons, and Laviolette has gone on to become just the fourth coach to bring three different teams to the Cup finals, following Dick Irvin, Scotty Bowman and Keenan.
Following a too-soon firing on Long Island after two seasons in his first NHL job, Laviolette won his Stanley Cup in 2006 with Carolina — a franchise that before his arrival and since his departure can be described as perpetually mediocre. He took the Philadelphia Flyers back to the finals — after leading his team back from a 0-3 deficit against the Bruins — before succumbing to a burgeoning dynasty from Chicago. Now Laviolette, along with the charismatic P.K. Subban (apparently Laviolette has no problem coaching the former Montreal Canadiens defenseman), have turned Music City hockey mad.
Unlike Laviolette, Sullivan did get a chance to coach the B’s, but his reign ended after his second season. It was no fault of his own, but rather a poorly conceived strategy from ownership coming out of the lockout of 2004-05. After refusing to let O’Connell sign most of the team’s top free agents just before the lockout, the B’s could not ink any of the high-end free agents once business resumed. Predictably, the product floundered. First, O’Connell paid for it with his job, and then Sullivan was let go by new GM Peter Chiarelli after the season.
While Laviolette was able to jump from NHL job to NHL job, Sullivan worked his way back through a decade in relative anonymity, following John Tortorella as his assistant from Tampa Bay, New York and Vancouver before finally getting another head coaching job with the Penguins’ AHL affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton last season.
He didn’t stay in the minors long. After Mike Johnston was fired in December 2016, Sullivan did a remarkable job turning a talented but mentally fragile team into a champion again. He might have done an even better job this season. It’s one thing to come into a program midseason and light a fuse, it’s another to handle the peaks and valleys of an 82-game schedule. Sullivan is now on the verge of becoming the first coach to win back-to-back Cups since Bowman did it two decades ago.
This should be a terrific series. Both teams are missing key players. While Kris Letang is out of the Pittsburgh lineup, the Preds will be without top center Ryan Johansen. Our pick? Nashville’s four-pack of defensemen — Subban, Roman Josi, Mattias Ekholm and Ryan Ellis — will prove too much for the Pens.
But as both teams reflect their hard-driven Massachusetts-born coaches, don’t expect either team to go away easily.