Guy Boucher

[Le Barron de HF]

Hey Hab fan over here, with the way Montreal has been playing I hope our coach gets canned. I've been a huge Boucher fan since his days with Hamilton. I was wondering if I could get a report on his strenght and his weaknesses. A lot of people put emphasis on the system he played in Tampa but I think he can be versatile in his tactic approach. What do you guys think? Is he a good coach? What was is his downfall?

Thanks in advance for the info

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[DFC]

Boucher's always a good topic for debate around here. I think most TB fans feel Cooper is an upgrade over him, but there's a bit of differing opinion on what Boucher actually was.

Strengths: I feel like Boucher is a great hockey mind. He can diagnose a problem on the ice. And contrary to what others might think (here comes some differing opinion stuff), I think he's a very good guy for teaching young players how to reach their individual potentials.

Weaknesses: Under Boucher, TB didn't necessarily play like a team. They played like five individuals on the ice at a time, with very little cohesiveness between them. There was a lot of talk that Boucher's defensive system was too complex for a young, inexperienced team to handle. I don't know if that's true, but I can tell you TB doesn't get pinned in their zone nearly as much as they did last year. Boucher can get individuals to reach their potentials (see Stammer scoring 60), but he doesn't really get the best team effort (Stammer scored 60 and was only a +7).

Also, Boucher was TOO positive. He was so positive that it got to the point where it felt like he wasn't holding players accountable for their mistakes. We'd get shelled and Boucher would do an interview focusing on the good things we did in the game, and how the team was improving and maturing. And the guys just kept making the same mistakes over and over. He's kind of the anti-Therrien in that regard, maybe.

A lot of people have said Boucher got fired because of weak goaltending, but honestly, I think Yzerman gave Boucher a longer leash than he'd have otherwise had because of weak goaltending. Yzerman didn't fire Guy until long after it was clear to pretty much everyone that the team had quit on him. They lost passion in the end. And you can see under Coach Cooper that this is not a team that lacks passion. Had Lindback been adequate last year, I think Guy would've gotten the ax earlier. (Another note: I'm thankful Lindback was so dreadful last year, because otherwise we would never have acquired Bishop.)

Over all, I've always thought Guy Boucher would be a good addition to any organization, but I don't necessarily think head coaching is where he belongs. An associate coaching role or some sort of consultant, in my opinion, might be best for him.

 

[Felonious Python]

There has been quite a bit of discussion on Guy, but it's very feast or famine. Either quality shots from your opponent are being eliminated or your goalie is going to have to stop 3-on-1's, which is partly where the goaltending becomes such a huge issue.

I wouldn't agree that he was necessarily too complex. He coached junior and AHL before TB and won there.

The overall coaching staff quality was also something that came under question later, which had something to do with his positivity and tendency to stick with 'his guys'.

Whether he can sustain long term success is probably the biggest question.

 

[Lord Stan 2020]

Hey Hab fan over here, with the way Montreal has been playing I hope our coach gets canned. I've been a huge Boucher fan since his days with Hamilton. I was wondering if I could get a report on his strenght and his weaknesses. A lot of people put emphasis on the system he played in Tampa but I think he can be versatile in his tactic approach. What do you guys think? Is he a good coach? What was is his downfall?


Thanks in advance for the info

Are you by chance a basketball fan? Think Mike D'antoni. Or football? Think Chip Kelly. I really see something with Boucher offensively. Something special. Yet some of that causes defensive issues and lapses.

Boucher might be an offensive hockey genius now that being said you cannot put everything on Boucher.

Part of blame has to be to staff. Part of the blame has to be on goaltending and defense also.

Cooper has Bowness and to me that is quite a wonderful upgrade to some of the other staff members we had with boucher.

The lightning gave up 400 goals for the 2 season yes we scored a boatload. So fast break wise scoring wise was incredible.

If you put Boucher with a good staff who knows what would happen. He had to learn a lot in the 2 years. Now he had a year to think on his failures and IMO you only truly learn from failures or losing.

 

[Coopers Gum]

Guy Boucher has probably one of the greatest hockey minds out there. His adaptability was a strong suit. A lot of times, you'd see the team take a late timeout, and see Boucher drawing up a gameplan on the board, and then the team would score. that was always pretty cool to notice. Boucher is a positive fellow, no doubt. As other have said, it seemed he was SO positive that he hardly ever held players accountable for their mistakes. You could not outcoach Guy Boucher. That being said, that was his downfall in my opinion. He made the game difficult. Guy tried too much to outsmart the opposition. He took the x's and o's part way too seriously. And he was a bit stubborn and refused to change his system. As someone said, it got to the point where the team was no longer a team, but 5 individual players. It's something we've noticed since Cooper took over.

Our defense under him was not very good to say the least. It was a passable corps in 2010-2011, masked by our offense. in 11-12 and 12-13, it was definitely exposed. Boucher liked to go with a high risk, high reward type of system. There were many odd man breaks per game. And since our tendys didn't make key saves, pucks most often went in the net.

The 1-3-1 system was so overblown by that Flyers game, if you're concerned about that. The team didn't play it all that much. It was a patch by Guy to fix our **** D. It did limit teams chances; however, it got exposed after his first season, and wasn't nearly as effective once coaches dissected it and learned how to beat it. Whether his first season was greatly aided because of his assistant coach Wayne Fleming, is up in the air really. Fleming was unable to perform his coaching duties outside of his first year here, and his experience is what a lot of us think helped Guy along. Guy's supporting staff was greatly suspect.

Like I said, Guy ran a high risk, high reward type scheme. As you might recall, the Lightning could score almost at will the past few seasons. However, with that reward, comes the risk, which was highly exposed, causing the Lightning to give up wayyyyy too many goals.

He's also a great personality. He has a pretty dry sense of humor that resonates with me anyway. There was almost always an inspiring or funny quote in any interview he did.

It's my opinion that if he were to get a head coaching job, he would likely learn from his mistakes here. This season has really put into perspective for me just how important coaching is in this league. Sorry for the book.

 

[LightningStrikes]

Guy Boucher has probably one of the greatest hockey minds out there. His adaptability was a strong suit. A lot of times, you'd see the team take a late timeout, and see Boucher drawing up a gameplan on the board, and then the team would score. that was always pretty cool to notice. Boucher is a positive fellow, no doubt. As other have said, it seemed he was SO positive that he hardly ever held players accountable for their mistakes. You could not outcoach Guy Boucher. That being said, that was his downfall in my opinion. He made the game difficult. Guy tried too much to outsmart the opposition. He took the x's and o's part way too seriously. And he was a bit stubborn and refused to change his system. As someone said, it got to the point where the team was no longer a team, but 5 individual players. It's something we've noticed since Cooper took over.

Our defense under him was not very good to say the least. It was a passable corps in 2010-2011, masked by our offense. in 11-12 and 12-13, it was definitely exposed. Boucher liked to go with a high risk, high reward type of system. There were many odd man breaks per game. And since our tendys didn't make key saves, pucks most often went in the net.

The 1-3-1 system was so overblown by that Flyers game, if you're concerned about that. The team didn't play it all that much. It was a patch by Guy to fix our **** D. It did limit teams chances; however, it got exposed after his first season, and wasn't nearly as effective once coaches dissected it and learned how to beat it. Whether his first season was greatly aided because of his assistant coach Wayne Fleming, is up in the air really. Fleming was unable to perform his coaching duties outside of his first year here, and his experience is what a lot of us think helped Guy along. Guy's supporting staff was greatly suspect.

Like I said, Guy ran a high risk, high reward type scheme. As you might recall, the Lightning could score almost at will the past few seasons. However, with that reward, comes the risk, which was highly exposed, causing the Lightning to give up wayyyyy too many goals.

He's also a great personality. He has a pretty dry sense of humor that resonates with me anyway. There was almost always an inspiring or funny quote in any interview he did.

It's my opinion that if he were to get a head coaching job, he would likely learn from his mistakes here. This season has really put into perspective for me just how important coaching is in this league. Sorry for the book.

Very good post. Especially the bold part. Outside of Fleming (may he rest in peace) his staff was very questionable IMO. I think Bowness and Gwozdecky play a huge part in Cooper's recent success here.

Guy is very smart and a tremendous hockey mind. His system was complex, maybe too complex. I think to be successful with it you need to assemble a very intelligent team which - as it turned out - is very hard to come by. Guy was emphasizing how guys like Nate Thompson, Dominic Moore or Sean Bergenheim just instantly "got him" while others just couldn't break through. I still think it's a little bit unfair to put last year's mess all on him. I do think he didn't really have the personnel to make it all work. But I also think a NHL coach has to be able to adapt appropriatly. He couldn't (yet). Maybe he was too inexperienced after all. Or maybe too stubborn. Or too optimistic.

On a side note: He seemed like a great person. Even when it was crystal clear that we had to make a coaching change I was kinda down when I got the news that he was let go. Just a nice and cool guy. Too bad it didn't work out.

PS: Oh the memories.

 

[TheDaysOf 04]

There are a lot of positives as you can see from the other responses. I would say he was well liked by the players and fans here for his professionalism and hard work. He never threw players under the bus. Guy looked like he a very genuinely nice person and always very classy. Even in the end you could see the respect his players still had for him. Unfortunately it was just his time to go and things weren't going very well at the time. He was now in his 2nd straight losing season since making a lot of noise in the playoffs in 2011. So I guess you could say expectations were high after that run. Yzerman had just spent a lot of money on Salo and Carle too. Even with a rookie goalie, that's the type on money spent to win now, and they didn't. After they fell behind they could never catch up. It was a hard situation with the lockout season because the games were packed together so closely there was no room to practice and fix our mistakes. Guy is very precise in what he wants from each individual to execute his systems. His stuff was very detailed and calculated, so without that practice time it was almost impossible for us to get going. He had a habit of over coaching sometimes too. Too much information can be bad. Coop was just winning and winning, and he developed an amazing group of players that are now a large part of our team, and others that could be. Coop was the perfect choice to move forward with once the kids were ready to move up.

When he had the time to put his brain to work, you could see how smart he could be. If you want to see Boucher at his best watch the 2011 playoffs, especially our sweep of the #1 seeded Caps. He completed out coached Boudreau. Boucher is definitely an innovative mind. It's very different from the old boys club way of thinking of how to build a team and play the game. This upset some people (cough cough nbc crew). That spotlighted game against the Flyers with the infamous 1-3-1 only shows how great a tactician Boucher was. He was able to completely back the Flyers in their own zone because they unlike other teams had no idea how to handle it and Boucher exploited that. They didn't even attempt to try to break it. He was great at changing plays to match the situation and the opponent. Against Boston in the 2011 ECF, you saw this with his selection of play changing to catch the Bruins off guard. He drew up plenty of set plays too. He was incredible at thinking about this part of the game. More so than anybody else I've ever seen coach here. This increased the performance of a lot of our players that were able to benefit from his structure. He made good use of his degree in sports psychology too. I'll always remember about how after Tocchet was fired he threw Vinny under the bus. Vinny had gone through so much with injuried, trade rumors, and some really bad play, and Boucher came in and really picked him up. He got Vinny playing the best defense of his career back then, and Vinny played like a champ again.

I'd like to see him get another coaching opportunity in the NHL. The Habs would be a good choice because he's speaks French and he has good history with that organization with the Bulldogs. I don't know if I'd take him as a head coach if I'm a GM. 1 winning season in the NHL is a risky hire, but I guess no more than looking in the AHL coaching pool.

 

[chasespace]

If he ever figures out how to change up his gameplan instead of sticking with something that has been figured out and is no longer working then he'll be an amazing coach.

As it stands, he's just a good coach.

 

[TheDaysOf 04]

PS: Oh the memories.

Haha I forgot how good a lot of these were.

 

[Callum]

Great hockey mind. But I just don't see him being a good coach with the Habs.

I still think he finds success somewhere, still young for a coach. Plenty of time for him.

 

[Le Barron de HF]

Thanks for the well detailed insightfull posts guys. Good to hear! So some of you are not sure if he'd be a good fit with the Canadiens?

 

[Felonious Python]

Thanks for the well detailed insightfull posts guys. Good to hear! So some of you are not sure if he'd be a good fit with the Canadiens?

If he's surrounded by the right people in both staff and players.

I sort of look at Boucher more like a player than a coach as there's considerations of having the right makeup of players and supporting coaches where Jon Cooper is basically a Ron Popeil rotisserie. Set it and forget it.

 

[LightningStrikes]

Gary Boucher on the other hand...

 

[MattM92]

As has been said before, he is a genius hockey mind that was forced into a gimmicky system due to the roster. My biggest complaint about him is that he wasn't very good at making adjustments. We kept the 1-3-1 for 3 years despite it being cracked after the first year. Even in game adjustments weren't done very well. It just seemed that whatever the game plan was for any particular game, that was the plan and they would stick to it, win or lose. He was also stuck with an awful crew except for Wayne Fleming, and I really believe that Fleming was the reason we were so successful early on. Once he passed away, the team was noticeably different.

Personally, I didn't like him. He seemed to never hold his players accountable, though I have no idea what happened in the locker room. The one thing I do know is that Martin St. Louis quit on him. Takes a lot for that to happen.

 

[DFC]

http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=442291

 

[Lord Stan 2020]

http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=442291

really interesting reading some of the quotes below lol.

They have 5 goals in 5 games and are blaming price lmfao wow just clueless talking canadans. They were complaining on D too but if you get a goal a game in this league you are not gonna win a lot.

Good luck Guy sc bern has been a very good team last few years

 

[Felonious Python]

'too much French on the bench' was apparently a complaint some TB players had during Guy's tenure.

Not French-Canadians, but coaches speaking French to each other and the French players, etc.

(sauce: today's MvsW)

 

[Callum]

'too much French on the bench' was apparently a complaint some TB players had during Guy's tenure.

Not French-Canadians, but coaches speaking French to each other and the French players, etc.

(sauce: today's MvsW)

Interesting. Can't say I'd be happy with this if I couldn't speak French. If true, I think it's rather unprofessional.