Every time a new NHL coach is hired, we hear about how he’s a perfect fit.
When Marco Sturm was introduced as the 30th coach in Boston Bruins history on Tuesday, he also made it clear that Boston was the right fit for him.
“I didn't want to take my first opportunity and just go for it,” Sturm said. “No, I wanted to be prepared. And yes, I always wanted to come back here, obviously, but I think the timing of it was just perfect, right? Selfishly, I'm glad the Bruins didn't play well last year, because otherwise I wouldn't be here. Let’s be honest.”
That’s pretty candid, especially for a first-time NHL bench boss.
Sturm’s 302 games played with the Bruins between 2005 and 2010 are a strong sell for the fan base. Here’s a guy who had boots on the ground as Boston transformed from a non-playoff team into a Stanley Cup champion. He skated alongside franchise legends Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron, and Bergeron was on hand at Tuesday’s presser to show his support.
While the new coach talked about how excited his two kids – now young adults – are excited that the family will once again have a home base back in Boston, he has to feel good about the success rate of the coaches that have preceded him.
Look past Joe Sacco, who was strictly an interim placeholder last season. Here’s what you’ve got:
- Jim Montgomery, 2022 to 2024: 2023 Jack Adams Winner, .652 points percentage
- Bruce Cassidy, 2017 to 2022: 2020 Jack Adams Winner, 2023 Stanley Cup champ (with the Vegas Golden Knights), .672 points percentage
- Claude Julien, 2007 to 2017: 2009 Jack Adams Winner, 2011 Stanley Cup champ (Boston Bruins), .614 points percentage
The Bruins are far from perfect, but they’ve put their coaches in positions to succeed for the better part of the last two decades.
With a new two-year contract extension in hand that will take him through the 2027-28 season, GM Don Sweeney said Tuesday the conversations he held with his large field of 14 head-coaching candidates helped illuminate his club’s shortcomings.
“It can be uncomfortable, in terms of the critical eye that other people are watching your team and breaking down your team and the changes they want to make,” he told reporters. “You have to understand that the position we're in, we didn't execute both at the management level and the coaching level and the player level. So we have to be open to that and the tweaks that coaches want to make.”
The Bruins are going into the Sturm era without a captain in place, after Brad Marchand’s shocking deal at the trade deadline. David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy have worn the A’s for the last two seasons and, as Sturm pointed out Tuesday, are homegrown players who started their careers during the Chara and Bergeron era.
Having McAvoy back on the blueline following his shoulder injury will be helpful. And at 31, Hampus Lindholm should have plenty of tread left on his tires after he missed the last 65 games of the season due to a knee injury that required surgery.
While Jeremy Swayman’s unsettled contract situation cast a large black cloud on the Bruins heading into last season, his vibes should be much better after he wrapped up his year with a gold medal for Team USA at the IIHF World Championship last month, giving up just 12 goals in seven games and shutting out Switzerland in the gold medal game. On that team, U.S. right winger Conor Garland also called Bruins D-man Andrew Peeke “so underrated at how hard he played and how strong he was” on a shutdown pair with Brady Skjei.
After they were signed to a couple of the biggest contracts in 2024 free agency, Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov struggled to live up to expectations last season.
For the second straight year, Pastrnak shone at the Worlds – this time leading the tournament with 15 points and earning best-forward honors. Lindholm was right behind, finishing second with 14 points and joining Pastrnak on the tournament all-star team.
Ever so slowly, the door is cracking open for European coaches to work in the NHL. Sturm’s 938-game playing career certainly gave him name recognition and relationships to build off, but the World Championship stage was where he began to make his name as a coach nearly a decade ago.
In three seasons at the helm of his native Team Germany, Sturm helped move his national team from an also-ran into a perpetual playoff-round participant as one of the world’s top eight hockey nations.
Then, after helping the Germans win their surprise silver at the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sturm shifted his attention back to North America. Leaving his family behind to join the Los Angeles Kings organization in the fall of 2018, he gained experience as an assistant for three-plus years, then ran the bench of the AHL Ontario Reign for the last three seasons.
“Learning from, especially, from a guy like Todd McLellan, for me, he was the perfect fit – the perfect coach to learn from,” Sturm said. “Sometimes I say, ‘Yeah, now I'm ready,’ or you can hear ‘Marco’s ready,’ but I probably knew the on-the-ice stuff, right? I knew it as a player, a coach. I've seen a lot, and now, getting a lot of information from Todd and how he runs it, how he prepares. That's something I think I wanted to get better at, and I needed someone, I would say, to guide me through it.”
Because they’ve been chasing the Cup for more than a decade, Boston’s prospect pool is thin. But 2019 first-rounder and 2020 second-rounder Mason Lohrei established themselves as regulars last season, and there will be roster space available if any or all of Matthew Poitras, Fraser Minten or Fabian Lysell step up at training camp this fall.
The Bruins also hold the seventh-overall pick in the 2025 draft, their first top-10 selection since they took Dougie Hamilton at No. 9 in 2011. And according to PuckPedia, they’ve got more than $28 million in available cap space this summer, though they will need to take care of some young players. Morgan Geekie, Jakub Lauko, Marat Khusnutdinov, Beecher and Lohrei are all RFAs with arbitration rights.
When Sturm arrived in Boston in 2005 as one of the key assets coming back in the Joe Thornton trade, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight for the fan base.
“It was not my fault,” he said. “But I got here and I'm not going to lie, it was difficult because everyone loved Joe.”
Twenty years later, he’ll play a new role while trying to calm today’s choppy waters and guide a similar rise.
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