SAN JOSE – Bob Boughner said several people – including members of his coaching staff – reached out to him after the San Jose Sharks’ season ended in April, wondering what the future held.
The problem for Boughner, who had already been the Sharks’ coach for two-plus seasons at that point, was that he didn’t know himself.
“Everybody was calling me wondering what was going on,” Boughner said, “and I didn’t have any answers for them.”
Finally, after being left in limbo for about two months, Boughner on June 30 was informed by the Sharks, after what the team said was an exhaustive review, that he and his staff – assistants John MacLean and John Madden and video coach Dan Darrow – were being fired just as the team was ready to usher in a new general manager in Mike Grier.
Boughner, 51, said it was a challenging few weeks, as he and his staff waited to hear if they would return for a third full year.
“You want to start planning for the upcoming season and training camp, but you’re in a holding pattern,” Boughner told Bay Area News Group at SAP Center on Wednesday. “You want to be in contact with your players and none of that was possible because there were just so many question marks.
“I don’t blame anybody for the way it happened. I know there were a lot of unknowns going around that time. It was difficult, more so for my staff as well.”
Boughner wasn’t unemployed for long, as he was hired by the Detroit Red Wings as an associate coach on Derek Lalonde’s staff about a week after his Sharks tenure ended.
The Red Wings and Sharks on Thursday play for the first time this season, as Detroit looks to snap a four-game skid and San Jose wants to extend a season-long three-game win streak.
Boughner said he had conversations with interim general manager Joe Will at the end of last season but wasn’t pleased that he didn’t get any guarantees about coming back.
“I guess if anything, out of those meetings, there’s a sense of uncertainty with where (the Sharks were) going,” Boughner said. “I wasn’t happy about it at the time, but when the dust settles, you sort of see the reasons why. There were decisions to be made that really, I couldn’t get the answers that I wanted at the time.”
Adding to the uncertainty for Boughner was that the man who made him the Sharks’ full-time coach, Doug Wilson, had stepped down on April 7 as general manager for health reasons after 19 seasons. Wilson said last month that his health was improving from an unspecified illness, but that he still faced challenges.
A new general manager was almost certainly going to choose their own coach, and four weeks after Grier was hired as GM, David Quinn was named the Sharks’ next full-time bench boss.
At the time of the firing, Will commended Boughner for the job he did integrating younger players into the lineup. He added, though, that the Sharks wanted a “fresh start,” and that dismissing Boughner and his staff allowed the next GM to “find their head coach and to partner up with him moving forward.”
“It wasn’t easy because we were going through so much, with all the other things that were going on off the ice. (Evander Kane) and all that stuff,” Boughner said of the Sharks’ former leading scorer, who had his contract terminated by the team in January.
“It was tough, not having (Wilson), our leader, the guy who brought me in. That wasn’t easy, but it was about something bigger than that. It was about Doug getting healthy again, which is the most important thing.”
The drama surrounding Kane was just one of the daunting headwinds Boughner experienced.
Boughner was the Sharks’ head coach from Dec. 2019, when he took over on an interim basis for the fired Pete DeBoer, until this June. He had a 67-85-23 record with San Jose, as the team missed the playoffs in three consecutive years for the first time in franchise history.
The Sharks just weren’t the same team in 2019-2020 that had reached the Western Conference final the year before, as they opted not to re-sign then-captain Joe Pavelski. The next year, the Sharks had to hold training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, thanks to a county-wide ban on contact sports that prevented the team from playing a home game until a month into a 56-game season.
Last year, with Kane out of the picture, the Sharks had 18 rookies play at least one game, setting a new franchise record. Tack on injuries to key players like Erik Karlsson and Mario Ferraro, and how the roster changed after the trade deadline, and the Sharks finished with a 32-37-13 record, all but sealing Boughner’s fate as the team’s head coach.
“We had a ton of young guys in our lineup over the last couple of years, trying to give guys opportunities, at the same time trying to keep the team competitive,” Boughner said. “For the most part, we did that. We held on as long as we could. Those are some of the good things I’ll take away.”
Boughner has been in San Jose as a visiting coach before but said it’ll be a unique feeling Thursday just because of the years he spent as the team’s head coach.
“I have some good relationships in that other room, not just with the players, but some of the staff over there,” Boughner said. “It’s not emotional. Everybody’s moved on. It’s definitely weird. It’s a weird feeling coming back in this building.
“But I wish everybody here all the best. The loyalty that I had over five of the last seven years as an assistant and as a head coach, (San Jose) has a special place in my heart. I’ll take those memories forever.”