When John Gruden was announced this week as the new head coach of the AHL Toronto Marlies, someone probably needed a quick clarification.
No, this was not the case of famed American football coach John Gruden, who would catch Ted Lasso fishing out of the water and reinvent himself as a minor league hockey coach. This was John Gruden, a lesser-known NHL player who had spent parts of six seasons with the Bruins, Senators, and Capitals, to take the Maple Leafs’ farm team bench.
But if you’re not quite sure of that distinction, Gruden, the hockey coach, probably won’t attack you. He said such instances of mistaken identification, and the distinction between the letter “h” in his first name, occurred “a lot”. Once, when hockey player John Gruden was visiting his in-laws in Florida for spring break and football player John Gruden was shining as coach of the Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he recalled the palpable disappointment in the sound of FedEx. The delivery guy who came to the door with a package.
“(The FedEx guy) was like, ‘Oh, you’re on your own,’” Gruden said Friday at the Ford Performance Center. “So I have some (stories like this). But that’s what it is.”
Gruden, 53, spent last season as an assistant coach with Boston, managing the defensive backs under head coach Jim Montgomery. In the three seasons leading up to that, he served as an assistant coach with the New York Islanders, learning under the right hand of head coach Barry Trotz. Despite all that valuable experience, Gruden is still perhaps most famous for his time as head coach of the OHL’s Flint Firebirds. Gruden was appointed for the club’s inaugural season at Flint in 2015, and was infamously sacked by owner Rolf Nilsen two months into the campaign. Nielsen was reportedly upset that his son Haakon, one of the Firebirds’ defensemen, was not given enough ice time.
The shooting led to what amounted to a mutiny, as players, including Hakon, walked into the Firebirds’ front office and handed over their jerseys in protest, vowing not to play if Gruden was not rehired. The day after Gruden cleaned his office, he was back at work.
“I felt like Billy Martin — fired one day and hired the next,” Gruden said at the time.
The reference to Martin, the famous New York Yankees manager fired no fewer than five times by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, was apt. Just a few months later, Nielsen fired Gruden for the second time in the same season. The silliness of Trigger described Nielsen as an out-of-control power dealer. Shortly after this fiasco, the OHL slapped Flint’s owner with a five-year suspension and a $250,000 fine.
But for Gruden, you can make the case notorious—and the way he handled it with grace—it didn’t hurt. A few months after being hired in Flint, he was hired by the Hamilton Bulldogs, whom he promptly helped transform from a team that missed the playoffs in 2015-16 to OHL champions in 2018. Along the way, Gruden earned a reputation as an easy player to coach. Accessible if he is relentless and has a knack for teaching the best points of the game.
This playoff season in Hamilton, which included a Memorial Cup appearance, Gruden jumped the Trotz bench with the Islanders, leading to an opportunity last year with the Bruins, who had the greatest regular season in NHL history with 65 wins and 135 points. before being ejected in the first round by Florida.
“You know, there’s disappointment in the end. It’s a tough league,” Gruden said of a playoff game in Boston. “But it was a historic season for sure.”
The job of coaching a head coach, albeit in a lesser league, is tantamount to following a dream.
“Sometimes you have to get something in your gut and you have to go along with it,” Gruden said. “I don’t think there’s any reinvention of the wheel here. It’s a game. It’s a fun game. And there’s a reason these guys are playing it. So it’s exciting.”
Although Gruden arrived at the Leafs’ summer development camp this week, he said it’s too early to give general assessments of the talent that will stock this year’s edition of the Marlies, whose coaching staff led by head coach Greg Moore gutted after the second-round playoffs.
Gruden said he takes the responsibility of player development very seriously. He definitely has family experience in the craft. When Gruden’s son, Jonathan, made his NHL debut with the Penguins in January, Jonathan — perhaps most famously because he was traded to Pittsburgh in the deal that sent Leafs goaltender Matt Murray to Ottawa — credited his father as his first coach and role model. .
“He taught me everything about the game,” said Jonathan.
Speaking about his new role in Toronto, John Gruden said: “Our job is to try to make better players and, more importantly, a better guy, so I’m excited about that. I think every kid is a little bit different. Someone needs a little bit of work on something – out Ice or on ice, and that’s our job to determine that and our job is to help them get better with that. Again, I think it’s in my power to be able to decide those things. But at the end of the day, you know, it’s a partnership. We’re looking forward to this opportunity to help the players “.
If Gruden, who is from Minnesota, can say he’s made it to the big leagues, both as a coach and player, he’d like to stay longer as the latter.
“I was the kind of guy that only I was in the NHL, I was happy to be there,” he said of his 92-game career.
And if that makes him well-acquainted with the AHL and the now-defunct IHL, where he played the bulk of his professional games before stint with the Berlin Polar Bears in the Bundesliga, it also makes for a good story. Gruden made his NHL debut with the Bruins at the age of 23. But he didn’t score his first NHL goal until he was 33, playing his last set of games with the Capitals in 2003.
It turned out to be his only NHL goal. Which is exactly more than what head football coach John Gruden has ever recorded. Which amounts to a fun Medal of Honor. When hockey coach John Gruden watched Bruins Vezina Trophy winner Linus Allmark, the 13th guard in NHL history to score a goal in February, Gruden told Allmark he was in rare company: “I told him he hooked me up.”
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