Andrew Brunette is a hockey lifer. That was always the dream as a kid growing up in northern Ontario, and Brunette is living it.
He has a 15-plus year NHL career with more than 1,100 games played to his name, to go along with nearly a decade in front-office and coaching roles once he retired from playing after the 2011-2012 season.
But as he takes on his newest and most high-profile challenge of his hockey career — interim head coach of the Florida Panthers — Brunette is trying to stay out of the spotlight.
“It’s not really about me,” said Brunette, 48. “It’s about this group. I just want to keep it that way right now. They’ve been through a lot.”
It has been almost a week since Brunette was thrust into this job, taking over after Joel Quenneville resigned over his role in the mishandling of a 2010 sexual assault allegation made by a former player against an assistant coach while Quenneville was the head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks.
“Last week was a very physical week,” Brunette said, “but a tiring mental week, too.”
The whirlwind has since started to slow down. Since returning to South Florida on Saturday night, the team has held two practices and had two days off during the past four days — including a Halloween party Sunday for players and their significant others. It has been the first true opportunity to reset the focus, shift the attention back to what’s happening on the ice.
“Hopefully,” Brunette said, “this is a step to getting to the new normal. We’ll see.”
How long Brunette has the role remains uncertain. Brunette twice has said his job title as interim coach is “day-to-day.” General manager Bill Zito last week said the Panthers are “not going to rush out and chase anything for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.”
“We’re going to take our time and go through the process,” Zito said in an interview Friday with ESPN prior to the Panthers’ game against the Detroit Red Wings, Brunette’s first as interim coach. “For now, Andrew Brunette is the interim coach, and I can’t really tell you what the temporal scope is other than that honestly.”
He has kept the Panthers upright through his first week, with Florida splitting its first two games under his watch, both on the road. The Panthers beat the Red Wings 3-2 in overtime on Friday before falling in a shootout to the Boston Bruins on Saturday — Florida’s first loss this season after starting with a franchise-record eight consecutive victories.
Brunette’s first home game as interim coach is Thursday against the Washington Capitals (5-1-3) at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise. A home game with the Carolina Hurricanes, undefeated entering Wednesday, follows on Saturday. They will serve as the latest tests on the ice for a team that has been tested off the ice for the past week.
Brunette’s goal at this point remains simple: Keep the Panthers on their current trajectory, one that has them trending toward being favorites to win their first-ever Stanley Cup.
“It’s their team,” Brunette said. “Your leaders are your core group and they’re the ones that run your team.”
So far, so good on that front. Panthers players have embraced Brunette as he takes over head coaching duties.
“He’s one of the smartest hockey guys I have ever been around,” captain and star center Aleksander Barkov said.
“He’s been a great leader,” added defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, “a guy that can really step into the room through this tough time.”
But, perhaps most importantly in this moment, Brunette is a familiar voice.
He is in his third season with the Panthers after being hired by Quenneville prior to the 2019-2020 season. He has played a prominent role in coaching the team’s power play drills and had been a vocal presence on the ice during his tenure to this point.
“I think it helps us. It also helps him that he’s been here,” Barkov said. “He knows all the guys. He knows all the systems, so we didn’t change anything. We just keep playing hard and smart and trying to win games. We’ve been doing that.”
In addition to the 8-0-1 record that has them atop the Atlantic Division through the first month of the season, the Panthers are fourth in the league in goals scored per game (4.00), second in goals allowed per game (1.89), rank ninth in penalty kill efficiency (86.1 percent) and have arguably the top goaltending duo early in the season in Sergei Bobrovsky and Spencer Knight. Fourteen players have scored at least one goal and six players have found the back of the net at least three times through the team’s first nine games.
“I love the way we’re playing,” Brunette said. “I love the way we’re competing. So I think, for me, the focus is just on recharging the battery a little bit and going back to work. It’ll just keep moving forward. I think we’ve done a lot of good things. I think we can tidy up some areas, but for the most part, you can’t really complain.”
‘A grounded guy’
“Day-to-day” has always worked well for Brunette. It’s how he went from seventh-round pick in the 1993 NHL Entry Draft to more than 15 years of playing at the sport’s highest level.
He was never anything close to an NHL All-Star. He only even scored more than a point per game once in his career. Brunette’s skill was always his ability to fit in. From 2002-2009, Brunette played in 509 consecutive games — tied for the 22nd longest streak in NHL history — despite changing teams twice. In his last 10 seasons, he missed a total of seven games.
Those 1,110 games — the 187th most in NHL history — were far from guaranteed. When the Capitals picked him in the back half of the 1993 NHL Draft, Brunette weighed going back to the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) and playing as an over-age player to continue his development. Barry Trotz talked him out of it.
Trotz, who’s now the coach of the New York Islanders and has the third most wins in NHL history, was coach of Washington’s American Hockey League affiliate at the time and convinced Brunette to sign a two-way deal, which would let him bounce back and forth between AHL Providence and ECHL Hampton Roads. His instincts were spectacular — he did lead the OHL in scoring in his final year and Trotz said, “He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever seen from the top of the circles to the net and the goal line” — but the 6-foot-1, 212-pound left wing needed to improve his skating and conditioning. For five years, he mostly toiled in the minors, playing a total of 62 games for the Capitals, before Trotz helped give him another break.
The Nashville Predators entered the NHL in 1998 with former Washington general manager David Poile as their GM and Trotz as their coach. They took Brunette from the Capitals in the 1998 NHL Expansion Draft and Trotz made him a full-time NHL player for the first time.
“He’s a guy that has had to work at the hard-work part of the game, the things that don’t take a lot of talent. He worked at that,” Trotz said. “One of my favorite players I’ve ever coached because he’s a grounded guy.”
In Nashville, they nicknamed him “Rudy” — after Rudy Reuttiger — and Brunette’s NHL life truly began.
He scored 268 goals and logged 465 assists in his career. He scored his first goal against Florida in 1996 and was the last player to score on legendary goaltender Patrick Roy, doing so in overtime of a Game 7 in the first round of the 2003 Stanley Cup playoffs. Brunette was captain of the Minnesota Wild on four separate occasions.
“For me,” Brunette said, “it was just show up to work every day and see what happens.”
He played for six teams and his share of top NHL coaches, and took away “a little bit from all of them.”
His final two seasons with the Capitals were played under Ron Wilson, who twice coached the United States’ Olympics team. Brunette called him a “really smart guy, a really good hockey mind.”
He played two stints for Jacques Lemaire with the Wild, and gained a deeper understanding of “the X’s and O’s in the game” from the Hall of Fame player and Stanley Cup-winning coach.
He’ll forever be tied to Quenneville because of the circumstances of his promotion, but he also played for Quenneville twice with the Colorado Avalanche and Blackhawks. Quenneville also plucked Brunette out of Minnesota, where he had been an assistant general manager, to make him part of his Panthers staff in 2019.
As for the impact of Quenneville, who has the second most wins in NHL history, on Brunette’s career? He didn’t want to discuss that.
“We probably shouldn’t be… I’m gonna leave that one there,” Brunette said.
‘The game’s better than that’
Quenneville’s resignation is the reason Brunette is in the spot he’s in right now.
It all stems back from actions — or, rather, inactions — from more than a decade ago.
An investigation done by Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block was made public on Oct. 26 and detailed a 2010 meeting of “senior club management” after a player alleged sexual assault by then-Blackhawks video coach Brad Aldrich. The meeting, according to the report, took place after the Blackhawks beat the San Jose Sharks to advance to the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals.
Quenneville had previously denied knowing about the allegations, saying in a statement to the Associated Press in July that he “first learned of these allegations through the media earlier this summer.”
But Kyle Beach, who was previously unnamed in the report but revealed himself as the accuser in an interview with The Sports Network’s SportsCentre one day after the report became public, asserted Quenneville knew about his allegation.
“There’s absolutely no way that [Quenneville] can deny knowing it,” Beach said in the interview.
Quenneville coached the Panthers’ game against the Bruins on Oct. 27 that started about an hour after Beach’s interview aired, met with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman on Thursday afternoon in New York and handed in his resignation shortly afterward. The Panthers then tabbed Brunette as their interim coach.
“Whatever conversations I had with Joel and [Panthers owner] Vinnie Viola had with Joel, Joel ultimately concluded the most sensible course of action was for him to resign,” Bettman said Monday, declining to say if a framework of a potential suspension or NHL discipline was presented to Quenneville during that in-person meeting.
Brunette called the revelations from the investigation “a sad day for the game of hockey.”
“We’re better than that. The game’s better than that,” Brunette said. “Hopefully, we learn this time.”
These are, of course, not the circumstances by which Brunette expected to get his first head job. They might, however, be the circumstances he’s best equipped for.
Florida has been a juggernaut so far — the best team in the NHL — and, on the ice, Brunette just needs to keep the ship on course. Off the ice, he has the demeanor to guide the Panthers through an unprecedented circumstance.
“I can tell you this: Andrew Brunette is genuine,” Trotz said. “He always comes to the rink with a smile on your face. He can make you laugh. … With all that’s happened in Florida, he might be the right guy for them, for sure, because you need someone that has the compassion that Bruno does.”
‘The focus is on hockey’
Through it all, the Panthers still understand the task at hand when they step on the ice.
“When the puck drops,” Weegar said, “all the focus is on the hockey game and focusing on winning and playing our best hockey.”
In addition to Brunette’s calming presence and steadfast demeanor, the Panthers’ veterans — a group that includes Barkov, Aaron Ekblad, Jonathan Huberdeau, Patrick Hornqvist and Joe Thornton — have helped maintain the status quo in the dressing room while they adapt to the change that came their way.
“Obviously it’s been a tough challenge for us here the last week or so,” Weegar said. “It really showed us how close we are. We’re a good group in there. We like being together.”
They also like the winning ways that came from the first month of the season. Even though their streak ended Saturday, only eight NHL teams ever have started a season with eight straight wins. They hope it’s a sign of things to come.
”It’s all about getting off to a good start,’’ Barkov said. “We need a good start because by the end, everyone is going to be playing good. “Good teams play really good at the start, too. We played hard right from the start. We had a good training camp and we’re going to keep building from this. It’s still early, but we want to keep building, keep getting better.”
The next test comes Thursday against the Capitals. Brunette will be behind the bench again, helping maintain the status quo while keeping the focus on the players.
“They expect [to be] where they’re at,” Brunette said. “They expect that of themselves. I see no real difference. Just keep it going.”
