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And the departures just keep on coming for the Boston Bruins.
A few weeks after assistant general manager Jim Benning left for a greater role with the Vancouver Canucks, and just days after the team confirmed that veteran winger Shawn Thornton would not be re-signed, assistant coach Geoff Ward has become the newest former Bruin, resigning from his post with the club for a head coaching gig in Germany.
He’ll be with the Mannheim Eagles of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga, to be exact.
Notable Eagles of last year include Jaime Sifers (former Toronto Maple Leafs), former Boston Bruins prospect Denis Reul, and even former NHLer Jochen Hecht. The Eagles may have some familiarity to some because they were also the lockout club of Dennis Seidenberg, Marcel Goc and even Jason Pominville back in 2012.
This will be Ward’s third stint coaching overseas in Germany (his first since a 2006-07 year spent with the Iserlohn Roosters), and comes after seven seasons as Claude Julien’s assistant coach in Boston. In Boston, Ward’s biggest responsibility came with the B’s power play.
At times, and especially once the Bruins lost Marc Savard to concussion issues, Ward found himself under heavy criticism from fans and pundits alike for his inability to find the missing piece.
Guys like Tomas Kaberle (though I think his struggles were a bit overblown based on the gigantic expectations he perhaps unfairly arrived to town with), Derek Morris, and Joe Corvo didn’t fit into Ward’s power-play scheme as originally envisioned. And it wasn’t until the arrival of Torey Krug and Jarome Iginla and the moving of Zdeno Chara up front as a forward that the B’s seemed to click on all cylinders on the man advantage.
In seven years behind the Boston bench, the B’s power play converted on 328 of 1,764 power-play opportunities, good for an 18.6 percent success rate, and finished in the top four in the league twice, with their 50-for-230 showing this past season enough for third best in the league (21.7%).
So now it’s on the Bruins to find Ward’s replacement.
Now, I can’t sit here and pretend to know which available assistant coaches come with a strong power play background. But I do know one name out there that should pique the Bruins’ excitement, and that’s former Bruin Adam Oates. The 51-year-old Oates is fresh off being fired by the Washington Capitals after just two seasons behind the bench as the team’s head coach, where his team was a five-on-five nightmare but survived thanks to a straight-up lethal power play.
Prior to his brief tenure in D.C., Oates served as an assistant coach in Tampa Bay (2009-10) and New Jersey (2010-2012), where his main focus revolved around the team’s man advantage.
Oates’ biggest strength in this department seemed to come with the team’s 1-3-1 power-play formation, which put a lot of emphasis on the club’s shooters along the half-wall. That obviously worked wonders with a guy like an Alexander Ovechkin or Ilya Kovalchuk blasting their one-timers all around, and let a defenseman at the middle of the attacking blue-line find some options or an open shot of his own (think Mike Green). This could no doubt work in Boston with a guy like Torey Krug or Dougie Hamilton at the point, but could sputter elsewhere given the lack of a real laser on the wings (the B’s don’t have a shot anywhere close to that of an Ovechkin or Kovalchuk either on their roster or in the minors for that matter).
But where this scheme could work in a theoretical Oates hiring, however, would be in front of the net. One of the other, greasier caveats of the 1-3-1 power play formation is the jam in front of the net that comes with two forwards jamming away for loose pucks between the circles. That’d cause absolute nightmares for a team trying to move say Milan Lucic and Chara out of the goalie’s way.
Personally, I think that Oates’ power-play resume speaks for itself, and I think that he’s an obvious first choice for the Bruins when it gets time to find a new assistant. But after getting a taste of what it’s like to be the head coach behind an NHL bench, envision Oates immediately taking a step back to being an assistant seems like a tough sell. However, if there’s one team that Oates could latch on with and harness what it takes to become a stronger coach at even-strength and even bolster his own stock for a potential open gig elsewhere in a year or two, it’s under Julien and the Bruins.
It requires swallowing a bit of your pride, no doubt, but it’s certainly become a bit more common as of late. The major example is undoubtedly John Stevens (former Flyers head coach) making a stronger name for himself coaching alongside Darryl Sutter in Los Angeles, with lesser examples coming with veteran coaches like Jacques Martin (Pittsburgh) and Craig Ramsay (Edmonton) returning to the game as assistants after faltering as a head coach.
There's obviously no replacement lined up as of this moment, and I'm sure the process will be long and well researched, but this situation might be worth more than just a reunion for both Oates and the B's should it present itself.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com