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Canucks: An emotional Bruce Boudreau knows it’s over

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The Vancouver Canucks’ head coach got emotional talking about his job security on Friday. He’s expected to be fired within days

What a way to treat a human being.

Asked Friday morning about how much he values being a head coach in the National Hockey League, Vancouver Canucks bench boss Bruce Boudreau got so emotional he couldn’t answer.

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“I’ll talk later,” was all he could manage in response to the final question of his pre-game media scrum, tears welling in his eyes and a lump clearly in his throat.

Everyone knew what it’s about: his days behind the Canucks’ bench are numbered.

He’s expected to be replaced within days, most likely by Rick Tocchet, the ex-NHLer who has been working for TNT’s NHL telecasts and who has served as head coach of the Arizona Coyotes and Tampa Bay Lightning.

Boudreau, who has generally been on the ice for morning skates decided not to join his team on Friday, as they prepared to face the Colorado Avalanche at Rogers Arena.

He didn’t address his team either about all the noise, though he said he may do so on Saturday, when the Canucks face the Edmonton Oilers.

“They know,” he said about what’s going on. “There’s a lot of media here.

“I’ve got my wife calling me saying ‘you’re not on the ice is everything okay?’ So you guys are getting it out all over the country. It’s tough not to feel it but I mean, you just love it. You love it. You want to go do it,” he said of pressing on, despite everything.

“That’s the way I shut it out and it’s basically just realizing how much you care about the game and the players and all that goes on.”

With this in mind, here are some numbers from Boudreau’s illustrious coaching career.

20

Boudreau is 20th all-time in wins. Going into the weekend he sat tied with Jaques Lemaire on 617 wins.

He’s three victories shy of Bryan Murray for 19th all time.

15

Boudreau has been an NHL head coach for 15 seasons.

Before being hired by owner Francesco Aquilini halfway through the 2021-22 season, Boudreau had coached the Washington Capitals, Anaheim Ducks and Minnesota Wild.

Boudreau’s coaching longevity is the 29th most seasons in NHL history.

Los Angeles’s Todd McLellan and Dallas’s Peter DeBoer have also coached for 15 seasons in the NHL.

2

Of the 22 coaches who have won more than 600 regular season games in their career, just one has a better career points percentage: Scotty Bowman.

It took Boudreau 1,049 games to get to 600 wins. It took Bowman 1,002 games.

53

Boudreau’s best run as a coach were his three full seasons in Washington, from 2008-09 to 2010-11.

His Capitals took 53 per cent of the even-strength shot attempts.

In that era teams hadn’t quite gotten their heads around the power of defending shots from the slot, so simply outshooting your opponents was a very simple metric to track likely future success.

Things have become a little more nuanced, as teams have become more adept at defending the slot and thus taking away the most dangerous shots.

At the same time, teams have pretty much stopped flinging pucks from the sideboards, and all the while scoring is up and shots per-game are up, too.

9.4

Boudreau’s teams have always impressive at finishing.

This season, the Canucks are scoring on 9.4 per cent of their shots taken at five on five.

That’s fourth best in the league and is in keeping with Boudreau’s historical record.

In his three full seasons in charge in Washington, the Capitals had shot 8.5 per cent at five on five, good for fourth best in the league.

In his three full seasons in Anaheim, the Ducks had the fifth best five-on-five shooting percentage in the league at 8.3 per cent.

Even in Minnesota his team was in the top third of the league, scoring on “just” eight per cent of their shots, but still ninth best in the NHL.

Boudreau knows how to wring goals out of his lineups.

2

Boudreau has been a head coach since 1992, when he made debut behind the bench for the Muskegon Fury of the old Colonial Hockey League.

In the three decades he’s been a head coach, leading teams in the old International Hockey League, the East Coast Hockey League, the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League, he had just two losing seasons before this one.

In his third year coaching he was let go as head coach of the IHL’s Fort Wayne Komets, a year after leading the Komets to the Turner Cup final. (His son Ben now coaches the Komets, who play in the ECHL these days.)

The Komets had a losing record when he was let go.

The only other losing season on Boudreau’s resume was his first season in charge of the AHL’s Lowell Lock Monsters, but his team still made the playoffs that year, losing in the second round.

A big key to Lowell’s second-half surge that year was the addition of Roberto Luongo, who was in his first year of professional hockey and was farmed out to Lowell by the New York Islanders half way through the season.

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Here’s what we know about the allegations against Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara

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LOS ANGELES –

Only a week has passed since the Los Angeles Dodgers abruptly fired Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter and constant companion of their new $700 million slugger, Shohei Ohtani.

But the biggest story of baseball’s spring is still murky — and shocking — as the regular season begins in earnest Thursday.

The scandal encompasses gambling, alleged theft, extensive deceit and the breakup of an enduring partnership between the majors’ biggest star and his right-hand man. Investigations are underway by the IRS and Major League Baseball, and Ohtani publicly laid out a version of events Monday that placed the responsibility entirely on Mizuhara.

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Here are the basics as Ohtani and the Dodgers prepare for their home opener against St. Louis on Thursday:

Why was Ippei Mizuhara fired by the Dodgers?

Ohtani claims his close friend repeatedly took money from his accounts to fund his illegal sports gambling habit. Ohtani also says he was completely unaware of the “massive theft,” as his lawyers termed it, until Mizuhara confessed to him and the Dodgers last week in South Korea, where the team opened its regular season against the San Diego Padres.

Mizuhara has given more than one version of his path to this trouble, which was catalyzed by the IRS’ investigation of Mathew Bowyer, an alleged illegal bookmaker. Mizuhara has consistently said he has a gambling addiction, and he abused his close friendship with the Dodgers superstar to feed it.

Did Shohei Ohtani ever bet on sports?

That’s the biggest question to be answered in Major League Baseball’s investigation, and the two-time AL MVP emphatically says he has never gambled on sports or asked anybody to bet on sports for him.

Further, Ohtani said Monday he has never knowingly paid a bookie to cover somebody else’s bets. Mizuhara also said Ohtani does not bet, and Bowyer’s attorney said the same.

Mizuhara told ESPN on March 19 that Ohtani paid his gambling debts at the interpreter’s request, saying the bets were on international soccer, the NBA, the NFL and college football. If that were true, Ohtani could face trouble even if he didn’t make the bets himself — but ESPN said Mizuhara dramatically changed his story the following day, claiming Ohtani had no knowledge of the gambling debts and had not transferred any money to bookmakers.

MLB rules prohibit players and team employees from wagering — even legally — on baseball. They also ban betting on other sports with illegal or offshore bookmakers.

What’s next for Ohtani?

Ohtani has played in every Dodgers game since the story broke, and he is expected to be their designated hitter in most regular-season games this season while baseball’s investigation continues.

Ohtani says his legal team has alerted authorities to the theft by Mizuhara, although his team has repeatedly declined to say which authorities have been told, according to ESPN.

Ohtani’s new interpreter is Will Ireton, a longtime Dodgers employee and fluent Japanese speaker who has filled several jobs with the team in everything from game preparation and analytics to recruiting free-agent pitches. But Ireton won’t be Ohtani’s constant companion, and manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday he’s optimistic that Ohtani will become closer to his teammates without the “buffer” provided for years by Mizuhara.

What don’t we know?

MLB’s investigation of Ohtani’s role in the events could last weeks or months, and it’s unlikely to be publicized until it’s complete. No one outside of Ohtani’s inner circle knows what it will find or how serious any repercussions could be, and nobody outside the circle is making informed speculation about the process.

One major question looms: How did Mizuhara have enough access to Ohtani’s bank accounts to get the alleged millions without Ohtani knowing? Is the slugger overly trusting, or is he wildly negligent in managing his vast fortune, which includes years of lavish endorsement deals in addition to his baseball salaries? Why didn’t the team around him, including his agent, do more to prevent the possibility of the theft he claims?

Finally, where is Mizuhara? Anybody who knows isn’t saying. He was fired in South Korea and apparently didn’t travel home with the Dodgers. Japanese media have visited his home in Southern California to look for him. Although he was born in Japan, Mizuhara’s life is in the U.S. — but his life will never be the same.

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