Minnesota Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau has been coaching for 14 NHL seasons and is far from naive. As his team continues to struggle, a 6-10-1 record so far this season and sitting at the bottom of the Central Division, Boudreau knows he will bear the brunt of the blame if the team doesn't start to win soon.
“It’s a winning league. If you don’t win, bad things happen," Boudreau told he LA Times this week. “I can’t control anything that’s happening, so I just go on. If I worried about that every day, I’d be a basket case. So you just go, ‘Whatever happens, happens,’ and I think we’re capable of doing better than where we are right now and hopefully we do.”
Unfortunately for Boudreau, the roster left to him by previous GM Paul Fenton won't be a whole lot of help. The Wild can manage to put pucks in the net, but have trouble keeping it out of theirs. There's also the awful contracts of forward
Zach Parise and defenseman
Ryan Suter, who are in their mid-30s and carry a cap hit of $7.5 million each through 2024-25. That said, Boudreau says he doesn't want to leave.
“I love what I do. I’m just happy to be here,” he said.
How much longer he's there is up for debate right now. Newly hired GM Bill Guerin has said he wants to give Boudreau a chance to right the ship, but he's only going to wait so long and, of course, there's always the prospect of a new GM wanting their own guy to coach the team.
Source:
LA Times