When John Gruden was announced this week as the new head coach of the AHL Toronto Marlies, perhaps there were those who needed a quick clarifier.
No, this wasn’t a case of Jon Gruden, the famous U.S. football coach, cribbing the Ted Lasso fish-out-of-water act and reinventing himself as a minor-league hockey coach. This was John Gruden, the much less famous NHL journeyman who spent parts of six seasons with the Bruins, Senators and Capitals, taking over the bench of the Maple Leafs’ top farm team.
But if you weren’t quite sure of the distinction, Gruden, the hockey coach, probably won’t hold it against you. He said such cases of mistaken identity, the differentiating “h” in his given name aside, happen “a lot.” Once, when hockey’s John Gruden was visiting his in-laws in Florida for spring break, and football’s Jon Gruden was rising in profile as a Super Bowl-winning coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he remembers the palpable disappointment in the voice of the FedEx delivery guy who’d arrived at the door with a package.
“(The FedEx guy) was like, ‘Oh, it’s only you,’ ” Gruden was saying Friday at Ford Performance Centre. “So I’ve got a few (such stories). But it is what it is.”
Gruden, 53, spent last season as an assistant coach with Boston, running the defensive corps under head coach Jim Montgomery. In the three seasons before that, he worked as an assistant coach with the New York Islanders, learning at the right hand of head coach Barry Trotz. For all that valuable experience, perhaps Gruden is still most famous for his time as head coach of the OHL’s Flint Firebirds. Hired for the club’s inaugural season in Flint in 2015, Gruden was infamously fired by owner Rolf Nilsen a couple of months into the campaign. Nilsen was reportedly upset that his son, Hakon, a Firebirds defenceman, wasn’t being given sufficient ice time.
The firing led to what amounted to a mutiny, with players, including Hakon, marching on the Firebirds’ front office and handing in their jerseys in protest, vowing not to play if Gruden wasn’t rehired. A day after Gruden had cleaned out his office, he was back on the job.
“I felt like Billy Martin — fired one day and hired the next,” Gruden said at the time.
The reference to Martin, the famed New York Yankees manager fired no less than five times by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, was apropos. Only a few months later, Nilsen fired Gruden for a second time in the same season. The hair-trigger silliness branded Nilsen as an out-of-control power monger. Not long after that fiasco, the OHL levied the Flint owner with a five-year suspension and a $250,000 fine.
But, for Gruden, you can make the case the notoriety — and the way he handled it with grace — didn’t hurt. A few months after he was refired in Flint, he was hired by the Hamilton Bulldogs, whom he promptly helped transform from a team that missed the playoffs in 2015-16 into OHL champions in 2018. Along the way, Gruden earned a reputation as an approachable if uncompromising coach with a knack for teaching the game’s finer points.
That watershed season in Hamilton, which included a Memorial Cup appearance, catapulted Gruden onto Trotz’s bench with the Islanders, which led to an opportunity this past year with the Bruins, who reeled off the greatest regular season in NHL history with 65 wins and 135 points before a first-round ouster to Florida.
“You know, there’s a disappointment with the ending. But it’s a tough league,” Gruden said of Boston’s playoff thud. “But it was an historic season, for sure.”
Taking a head-coaching gig, albeit in a lower league, amounts to following a dream.
“Sometimes you just gotta get something in your gut and you gotta go with it,” Gruden said. “I don’t think there’s any reinventing the wheel here. It’s a game. It’s a fun game. And there’s a reason why these young men play it. So it’s exciting.”
Though Gruden arrived at the Leafs’ summer development camp this week, he said it was too early for him to offer public assessments of the talent that will stock this year’s edition of the Marlies, whose coaching staff, led by head coach Greg Moore, was gutted after a second-round playoff elimination.
Gruden said he takes the responsibility of player development seriously. Certainly he has familial experience in the craft. When Gruden’s son, Jonathan, made his NHL debut with the Penguins in January, Jonathan — who is perhaps most famous for being 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’s taught me everything about the game,” Jonathan said.
Said John Gruden, speaking of his new role in Toronto: “Our job is to try to make better players and, more importantly, better young man, so I’m excited about that. I think every kid is a little different. Someone needs a little work at something — off ice or on ice, and that’s our job to identify that and it’s our job to help them get better with that. Again, I think it’s a strength of mine to be able to identify that stuff. But, at the end of the day, you know, it’s a partnership. We’re looking forward to that opportunity to help players.”
If Gruden, who is from Minnesota, can say he made it to the big leagues, both as a coach and a player, he would have liked to stay around longer as the latter.
“I was the type of player that was just if I was in the NHL, I was just 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 pro games before a stint with the Berlin Polar Bears of the German league, it also makes for a good story. Gruden made his NHL debut with the Bruins at age 23. But he didn’t score his first NHL goal until he was 33, playing his final handful of games with the Capitals in 2003.
It turned out to be his only NHL goal. Which is exactly one more than Jon Gruden, the football coach, ever scored. Which amounts to a fun badge of honour. When John Gruden, the hockey coach, watched Linus Ullmark, the Bruins’ Vezina Trophy winner, become the 13th goaltender in NHL history to score a goal back in February, Gruden informed Ullmark he was in rare company: “I told him he tied me.”
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