After Bruce Boudreau snub, what now for Senators’ coach search?

Bruce Boudreau is the new coach for the Minnesota Wild, which means he’s not going to be the new coach for the Ottawa Senators.

Which has to be a bummer for owner Eugene Melnyk and GM Pierre Dorion, who saw the jovial coach fly to Ottawa last week for an interview. He has family in the area. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the Senators were willing to get near Boudreau’s asking price of $3 million annually.

They didn’t, however, want to extend that contract to a fourth year. Which is understandable behavior from a franchise that’s gone through six different coaches since the start of the 2005-06 season.

The Minnesota Wild did. And Boudreau is their new coach.

So what now for the Senators?

According to Bruce Garrioch, the Seantors interviewed six other coaches in an effort to find Dave Cameron’s replacement: Former Wild coach Mike Yeo, former Toronto Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle, former Tampa Bay Lightning coach Guy Boucher, former Florida Panthers coach and current Chicago Blackhawks assistant Kevin Dineen, former Dallas Stars (and elsewhere) coach Marc Crawford and Benoît Groulx, head coach of the Gatineau Olympiques of the QMJHL.

Yeo, he writes, is the safe choice. And really, what better way to energize your fan base than by hiring the coach that was fired midseason by the team that just hired away the coach you really wanted to hire?

But the dark horse is Boucher:

This is the darkhorse candidate for the job that nobody has been talking about. He was fired by the Tampa Bay Lightning midway through his third season but has a 97-78-20 record in 195 games. The belief is after spending part of last season with SC Bern in the Swiss Elite League that he’s coming back refreshed, ready and humbled to be a better coach his second time around in the NHL.

Boucher’s a tough one to figure. He clearly lost the room at the end of his tenure. The Lightning were seventh in 5v5 Corsi in his first season (2010-11) but finished in the bottom 10 in the next two seasons. When his system works, his teams are damn hard to play against. It’d be interesting to see what he’s learned in his overseas sojourn.

Who do the Senators hire? Well, I mean, we all hope it’ll be Carlyle for the sheer comedy of that announcement. But Yeo and Boucher would seem to the two top options.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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