Forecasting the Bruins' head coaching sweepstakes

In a fast-moving development that indicates this might have been some time in the making, the Bruins missed on the first potential head coaching candidate when Mike Sullivan quickly signed on to be the new bench boss for the New York Rangers.

There were always natural fits there for the 57-year-old Sullivan, whether it was his past employment there as an assistant coach under John Tortorella, or his Boston University connection with Blueshirts GM Chris Drury, while having coached him a couple of years in New York as well.

The New York Post hinted that Sullivan has some kind of lingering reservations working again for the Bruins, and perhaps that’s not surprising after somebody has been previously fired by the current Boston ownership group. There’s also the fact that Sullivan is expected to land a big payday moving over to coach the Rangers, where ownership in New York was determined not to be outbid for his services.

The Bruins haven’t traditionally set the market when it comes to their coaching salaries, so that was probably always going to be something to overcome. None of that even gets into the family dynamic between Sullivan and son-in-law Charlie McAvoy, which wasn’t an issue for Team USA in the 4 Nations Faceoff but would have nonetheless been interesting to watch play out over the course of an 82-game regular season.

The bottom line is that the Bruins never seemed as highly motivated as the Rangers to bring in Sullivan, so they weren’t about to skip the whole search process with a coach who missed the playoffs in each of the last three seasons with the Penguins.

So the search is ongoing for a new head coach of the Boston Bruins as Jim Montgomery readies for a first round Game 7 with the St. Louis Blues against the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday at 7 p.m.

“We need to address, obviously, getting our goaltenders back to where they're pushing each other and [we are] defending in front of them much better, and that will be part of the coaching search,” said Don Sweeney during the end-of-season media availability a couple of weeks ago. “We've already started that process and knowing who's available and narrowing that [list of candidates] down as I go through some checkpoints. In terms of hitting the criteria, communication with players nowadays is paramount. Structure, detail and being organized is paramount.

“You can't not have it and survive. I want a coach that's going to evolve a little bit offensively, and again, that's part and parcel with being able to communicate with, sometimes, younger players and their stubbornness or their inexperience. We went through some of that this year where players were below their watermarks, and they couldn't get back from it.”

With the search ongoing, here’s a quick rundown on a number of expected candidates to be the next Bruins head coach:

• Jay Leach – Bruins assistant coach this past season who spent the last few seasons on Dave Hakstol’s staff in Seattle after cutting his teeth with the Providence Bruins. Is highly thought of in the B’s front office, but did not have a great season trying to help develop young defensemen like Mason Lohrei.

• Ryan Mougenel – The current Providence Bruins head coach and somebody who’s done a good job guiding young B’s skaters developmentally during his time in the AHL. He’s also helped push the P-Bruins to their first playoff series advancement since 2017, which is a pretty noteworthy accomplishment.

• David Quinn – A candidate for the NHL job in Boston during the search that led to Jim Montgomery, the Bruins brass thinks highly of the former Boston University head coach and former college coach of McAvoy. The big plus with Quinn is that he’s got tons of NHL coaching experience at this point, but he’s only made the playoffs twice in eight seasons coaching at the American League and NHL level.

• Jay Pandolfo – He merits a mention because he would be sought after by the Bruins, but there is zero chance he’d be leaving a head coaching job at Boston University after building up that program with a very good chance his blue-chip prospect son Sam could be playing with him a few years from now. Maybe five years from now, but this doesn’t figure to be the right time for Pandolfo and the Bruins.

• Joe Sacco – The interim Bruins head coach did an admirable job with a sinking ship, and the fair thing to do would be to give him a full training camp and season to implement things his way. That isn’t likely to happen, though, given the way things ended. Still, he will be a part of the process and should still get heavy consideration to remain on staff as the Bruins' associate head coach if that’s what he wants to do after taking one for the team.

• Greg Cronin – Another head coaching candidate that interviewed for the Bruins job three years ago, Cronin had an up-and-down tenure with a young team in Anaheim that ended with them playing well late this season. There were whispers that he was too hard on the young Ducks players, but honestly, aren’t we starting to see that maybe it's a player softness problem rather than a coaching problem?

• Nate Leaman – The longtime Providence College coach has an excellent resume, including stints as Team USA head coach, and now has current players in the Bruins system, including Michael Callahan and Riley Duran. The hang-up for a lot of these established college head coaches could be entering a situation where the general manager is in the final year of his contract, however. The same could be said for other college coaching names like David Carle, who also may steer clear of Boston because of his longtime association with Montgomery at Denver.

• Marco Sturm – The current coach of the Ontario Reign in the AHL and a former assistant coach with the LA Kings who obviously has some pretty great past history with the Bruins, including game-winning playoff goals against the Montreal Canadiens. Can you imagine the Sturm Face as the Boston Bruins head coach? He feels like a really interesting possibility that isn’t getting the same kind of attention as others, particularly with the way he's worked with young players developing in the Kings organization.