Andrew Brunette did not know what was going to come next. It was a feeling he had before: When he retired from the NHL after 1,110 games and 268 goals in 2013, he thought about coaching, going to work in a front office or maybe even getting on television — just something to stay in the hockey world.
This time was different. It was 2019 and the Minnesota Wild — the team with which he became a cult hero, fan favorite and even, on a couple different occasions, a captain — cast him aside as part of a front-office purge. After two different stints in the Wild’s front office and one as an assistant coach, Brunette was unemployed after seven years in St. Paul, Minnesota. Once again, he had to figure out what was next.
It was then Joel Quenneville called. He was putting together a coaching staff for his new job with the Florida Panthers and he wanted Brunette, who played for Quenneville at multiple stops, to be part of it.
“You’re on the fence a little bit, but I felt that at that point in my career ... I was at the time of my life that if I wanted to coach it was probably now or never,” Brunette said. “I had some other interest that I would maybe do a front office in another organization, which would’ve been fun, but I would’ve missed out on the opportunity maybe to coach. If I did my three years there and then all of a sudden you’re 50, and you’re kind of getting past that window.”
A little less than two months after they made Quenneville the splashiest hire of the 2019 offseason, the Panthers announced his full staff. Brunette, who had just two years of coaching experience on his resume, didn’t even get top billing on the press release.
A little more than two years and less than 150 games later, Florida asked him to take on a monumental task: A decade-old scandal forced Quenneville, the second winningest coach in NHL history and steward of the league’s best team, to resign after just seven games — all wins — and thrust Brunette into the spotlight as interim coach.
At the time, there was no guarantee Brunette was even going to finish the season. General manager Bill Zito initially didn’t commit to it, and Brunette took a next-man-up attitude and said he just planned to “do what’s asked” for as long as the Panthers needed him.
Now, he’s a legitimate contender for the Jack Adams Award after leading Florida to the Presidents’ Trophy for the first time in its history. He was never going to keep up the undefeated pace Quenneville set, but Florida’s .720 points percentage with Brunette at the helm still would’ve made it the top team in the Eastern Conference, even after he lost five of his first eight games.
Still, he goes into the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs as an interim coach and anything less than hoisting the Stanley Cup for the first time in franchise history will technically be a disappointment for the league-best Panthers.
With Brunette still an interim, it would theoretically make it easier for Zito and the organization to go in a different direction if Florida flames out. Brunette doesn’t worry, though.
“What’s the worst thing they can do?” he said with a grin. “Fire me?”
Why not Bruno?
It really did start, Brunette said, with a conversation ultimately amounting to something close to, Sure, why not?
When he was a player, Brunette was never a full-time captain, but he captained the Wild on four different occasions when the usual captain was injured. He played 509 consecutive games — tied for the 23rd longest streak in NHL history — not because he was a superstar anchoring a top line, but because he could go with the flow and fit in with pretty much anyone in basically any role. Even in those first non-playing jobs he had in Minnesota he was sort of just doing whatever the Wild asked — he went from hockey operations advisor to assistant coach because some coaches’ contracts were up and moved back to the front office after Minnesota made a coaching change.
When Quenneville brought him on as an assistant in 2019, Brunette made his own decision, opting to coach rather than go work in some other front office. When Quenneville’s role in the Chicago Blackhawks’ 2010 mishandling of a sexual-assault allegation came to light, Brunette went back to doing what he does best.
“It was a dark time for everyone,” Zito said. “We were confronted with this and I asked him, ‘Is this something you can do, to help the team?’”
Was there ever even a chance Brunette would say, No?
“It’s like you’re a player,” he said. “If somebody goes down, you’ve got to do your job. If the first line winger goes down and you’ve got to play on the first line, you’ve got to do your job.”
At the same time, Brunette, who coached the forwards and ran the power play, was secretly starting to cultivate aspirations of his own. Something had finally clicked in his two seasons with Quenneville. After a decade of searching for what exactly he wanted to do with life after hockey, he decided he wanted to coach his own team one day.
He just never thought it was going to be these Panthers.
“I didn’t think it’d be the NHL. It could’ve been anywhere,” Brunette said. “I was really digging in and maybe absorbing more than I ever did, obviously from the best and that was one of the reasons I came here, to be around the best.”
The complicated Q dynamic
Zito said Quenneville “certainly isn’t persona non grata” around the organization. Brunette said he’s still “a great resource” for him as a first-time coach.
No, Quenneville isn’t still around the team, but Zito and Brunette still talk to the disgraced coach. It has made for a strange situation in Broward County: The allegations against Quenneville were serious — in 2010, former Blackhawks prospect Kyle Beach accused former video coach Brad Aldrich of sexual assault, and a 2021 report from Jenner & Block found Quenneville was in a meeting in which the allegation was discussed and didn’t do anything about it — but the scandal happened long before Quenneville got to Florida and the Panthers “owe Joel an awful lot,” Zito said.
The former coach was a mentor to Brunette, an incredible collaborator with Zito and a massively respected leader for the players. In his second year in South Florida, Quenneville led the Panthers to the best regular season in franchise history, then followed it up by leading Florida to eight straight wins to set the foundation of an even better season this year.
“Joel didn’t lose all year,” Brunette said with a smile.
As challenging as it was for Brunette to guide the Panthers through a tumultuous moment, it was ultimately an advantageous situation. The Panthers were the best team in the league when Quenneville resigned and they’re the best team now.
In those first days, Brunette could coach the team like it was on autopilot. It’d be hard not to score a ton of goals with a roster including Jonathan Huberdeau, Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad and MacKenzie Weegar, and four-plus lines of forward depth, especially after Quenneville implemented an aggressive system to make the most of Florida’s speed and offensive talent.
He has mostly kept Quenneville’s 5-on-5 structure unchanged. The Panthers’ forwards still forecheck like crazy to try to keep the puck in the offensive zone as much as possible and their defensemen still jump up into the attack with impunity, even if it means giving up some breakaways the other way.
“He’s not someone who’s going to go and change something just for his ego,” Zito said. “He’s true to Joel. .... He’s true to himself.”
It’s a fair assessment, Zito said, to say Brunette has grown into his new job. When Ekblad went down with a knee injury in March, Brunette pivoted, and went with a five-forward alignment on the power play and the unit actually improved; after they traded for versatile All-Star forward Claude Giroux a few days later, the Panthers won 16 of their final 20 games.
Brunette even bested Quenneville’s season-opening seven-game winning streak by leading Florida to 13 straight wins — a franchise record — in April.
As seamless as the transition has seemed, those initial days weren’t easy.
“It was awful,” Brunette said. “I can’t overstate that enough.”
The plight of the interim
In 2021, Brunette proved he had the demeanor to lead a team through adversity. In 2022, he proved he had the coaching acumen to go with it.
“He’s been a good light at a tough time,” Weegar said. “He just gets us. He was around.”
With an interim label, Brunette is still technically living a day-to-day existence and the pressure is about to ratchet up to an even higher level. In the playoffs, even the best coaches fail more than they succeed and postseason hockey can be especially fickle.
It’s not like men’s college basketball, where only one No. 1 seed has ever lost once in the first round. It’s not even the like NBA, with its near-identical playoff format, where only four No. 1 seeds have lost in the first round.
In the NHL, No. 1 seeds have lost to No. 8 seeds 13 times since the league switched to a format with eight teams in each conference and five of the last 20 teams to win the Presidents’ Trophy — as the Panthers did this year with the league’s best record — have been bounced in the first round.
Only one of those 20 teams won the Cup. Even though Florida is the favorite in the East, the eighth-seeded Washington Capitals have better odds to upset the Panthers than Florida does to win the Cup, according to DraftKings
Maybe Brunette is just the leader the Panthers need, though. An interim has coached in three straight Stanley Cup Finals and three of the last 10 Cup-winning coaches took over in the middle of the season.
Two of those three, however, were full-time hires — established coaches brought in to jolt awake underachieving contenders.
Brunette had a different job. He had to keep Florida’s runaway train on the track. So far, he has passed every test, but he knows he will ultimately be judged by what happens in May and June.
Of course, there’s pressure. It’s just the same pressure everyone in hockey faces this time of year and Brunette, with nearly 30 years around the NHL, knows this as well as anyone.
“The interim thing doesn’t matter to me at all,” Brunette. “We’re all interim. That does not even cross my mind.”
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