Is Marco Sturm the coach to return the Bruins to Stanley Cup contention? ‘Absolutely, because I know this is my strength.'

Boston Globe

20 hours ago

'Absolutely,' offered a confident, blunt Sturm, 46, in the hours leading up to his morning news conference on Causeway Street. 'Because I know this is my strength.'
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Coaching, Sturm has come to realize, is what he is 'made for,' and he is convinced his skill set is particularly suited for the
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To be candid — a refreshing and embedded Sturm trait — he said he would not have been the right choice if, say, the Bruins of June 2025 stood on the cusp of winning the Stanley Cup. The last of those was 14 years ago, just months after general manager Peter Chiarelli shipped him off to LA. They have just DNQ'd for the first time since 2016. The last of the old guard, Brad Marchand, played here in the 2019 Cup Final, and stands two wins from winning the Cup as the Panthers' elder renaissance man.
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Opportunity? It's right here, a roster and playing attitude in need of a booster shot from behind the bench.
Timing? After seven seasons of prep work — four as a Kings assistant, three more as head coach of their AHL Ontario Reign affiliate — it's clear Sturm believes his smartwatch is buzzing and about to blow off his wrist.
'My biggest strength, one of them, everything comes from the heart,' he said. 'So I am very passionate. I am a very passionate guy. And I believe I am a very confident guy — I know who I am and where I come from, and I believe that I am a good coach.'
The career path came to him not by design. Sturm did not angle for coaching, give it so much as a 25-second shift's thought, during his 938-game NHL career. It found him some 10 years ago in that hockey hotbed of Boca Raton, where he was enjoying time with wife (Astrid) and kids (Mason and Kaydie), after wrapping up his NHL career with the nearby Panthers.
'We figured, OK, we'll stay here for a year,' said Sturm, speaking by telephone from his home some 20 miles north of Sunrise, where the Panthers routed the Oilers on Monday night in
Marco Sturm played 938 games in the NHL, including 302 with the Bruins.
Jim Davis/Globe Staff/Boston Globe
A few years into a happy retirement, his final shifts as a pro spent with the Cologne Sharks in Germany, Sturm drew back into the rink on this side of the Atlantic when helping with son Mason's team at North Broward Preparatory School. Mason, now 21, just wrapped up his freshman year on the Bowdoin College blue line.
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'He's 6-2,' said Mason's proud, chuckling 6-foot father, once among the NHL's burners off the wing. 'I planned for him to be a defenseman, wanted him to use his size more. So he had no choice.'
Daughter Kaydie, who gave up hockey for a love of basketball, plans to enroll at UMass Boston this fall as a freshman.
'We're an athletic family,' said their dad. 'They have been [after] me. 'Hey, Dad, should we buy a place?' And I was, 'Yeah, OK, no problem.' But now I have to anyway, because I need a place, too.'
Of greater significance to his coaching arc was the letter Sturm dashed off to Germany's national team just months into his retirement. His aim: to be a US-based scout, offering counsel to German-born players here in the pro and junior ranks and in turn informing the national team of their progress. Once their prospects shipped off to North America, Team Germany didn't have infrastructure in place to keep tabs on their development.
The response to Sturm's written cold call back home was favorable.
'So I went home in the summer and I met with the federation president, and I thought, 'OK, I am going to get the scouting job or something,' ' recalled Sturm. 'But no, he asked me to be the head coach and GM of the German national team. That caught me a little bit off-guard. But again, I didn't really hesitate.'
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Sturm spent four seasons (2015-19) deeply involved with the national team, in myriad roles such as GM and head coach, including his work with the country's World Championship and Olympic squads. He became the essential guy they essentially didn't know they needed.
'I pretty much created the whole hockey department for the whole federation,' he said. 'I changed everything pretty much. Which is great. I think that is my strength, too, and I ended up winning the silver medal at the Olympics.'
The silver came in the 2018 Games at PyeongChang, Sturm's unheralded squad taking the Olympic Athletes from Russia to the gold-medal game. Final score: Olympic Athletes from Russia, 4-3, in overtime. It remains Germany's biggest achievement on the international hockey stage, possibly a bigger lift than squeezing the Bruins into one of the two wild-card spots in the East.
'After that,' recalled Strum, 'then things really changed.'
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Sturm was a hot NHL commodity. Rob Blake, then the Kings' GM, and former Bruins winger Glen Murray, their director of player development, ponied up the best offer, and by the fall of 2018 Sturm was aboard as a Kings assistant.
Sturm's next game behind an NHL bench as head coach, this October, will be his first. There may be less risk in that than some Black and Gold followers believe.
The Bruins' last three Cup-winning coaches, Harry Sinden (1970), Tom Johnson (1972), and Claude Julien (2011), began their NHL bench boss tours without ever coaching at all in the NHL, be it as head coach or assistant. Sinden also never played a shift in the league. Johnson had never coached anywhere, at any level, prior to succeeding Sinden weeks after the 1970 Cup win. Julien took charge of the Canadiens' bench early in 2003, after two seasons as their head coach at AHL Hamilton.
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By Sturm's account, it sounds like he'll coach much like he played, and he'll want his new, unknown charges to do the same.
'A lot of emotion, lots of energy, I want those people who pay a lot of money [for tickets], I want them to feel it,' he said. 'But more importantly, I've got to feel it and the team's got to feel it. Every night. I think I am a very structured guy, on and off the ice. In today's game it is about fast pace and speed, put it all together, I think we will be OK.'
Sturm also understands, and firmly believes, the NHL is not the league he played in for 14 seasons. It is a two-way conversation, coach-player. Acknowledging that his two best coaches were Darryl Sutter in San Jose and then Julien in Boston, he also believes their style, particularly from a coach-and-player-communication standpoint, too often plays to a deaf ear in today's 32-team, kid-centric NHL.
'It is a different time right now,' Sturm said. 'There are still players out there who you can poke and kind of go that route. But a lot of guys now, you really can't do that.'
No one on the coach's side, he noted, 'followed up in the old days' when it came to criticism.
'You know, it was OK, rip you apart and it's done, that was it,' Sturm recalled. 'Today the teaching part comes in — that's where everything changes now as a coach. It is a fine line, when to be hard and when to be tough, when to teach. I think every player is different. Again, I am very competitive. As for my part of it, I want to be excellent every day and I demand that of my players. I think that is something I got from the Bruins, from the Chara, from the Bergeron, the way they practiced, the way they prepared every day. It doesn't matter if it is a game or practice, that has to come back. That is my first goal right away — to get that standard and that culture again like it should be.'
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Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at