The Toronto Maple Leafs have hired Marc Savard as an assistant coach (Twitter link). This news vindicates rumors about Savard’s connection with the team and reunites him with head coach Craig Berube, who Savard supported with the St. Louis Blues in 2019-20. The two will rekindle in Toronto, with Savard expected to assume his usual role as power-play coach.
Savard has become a popular coaching candidate despite just two years as an NHL assistant. But he proved plenty successful in both opportunities, leading the Blues to a 24.2 percent success rate on the power-play in 2019-20, good for third-best in the league. Savard stepped away from St. Louis after one season, moving to a head coaching role with the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires. Savard would spend two years in Windsor, leading the team to 44 wins in both seasons, and a run to the OHL championship in 2022. He kept his tenure brief, though, taking his talent behind the Calgary Flames bench in the 2023-24 season, where he found significantly less success than in St. Louis. Savard led the Flames power-play to a a 17.9 percent success rate, the seventh-worst in the league.
But for all of his coaching prowess, Savard is still remembered most fondly as a player. Originally selected in the fourth round of the 1995 NHL Draft, Savard won an OHL championship before making the jump to the AHL, and then NHL in the three years following his draft – finding a way to emerge as a top scorer at every step. Savard would move through appearances with the Calgary Flames and Atlanta Thrashers, consistently showcasing plenty of promising scoring and plenty tenacity, though he wasn’t able to play every game of a season until 2005-06. He performed well when fully healthy, recording 28 goals and 97 points and vindicating it with 96 points in 82 more games the next year. The pair of high-scoring seasons, which overlapped Savard’s move to the Boston Bruins, established him as one of the league’s top wingers. He’d carry that title through five years with the Bruins, though repeated injuries eventually caught up to Savard. He famously retired in 2011, citing concussions-related symptoms. He totaled 807 career games across 13 seasons in the league and retired just ahead of Boston’s 2011 Stanley Cup win, which would have been the first of his career. He’ll now look to chase that title as a coach, taking over a power-play unit featuring Auston Matthews and William Nylander, among plenty of other star offensive talent.
Very underrated player. Hope he can bring those brains to the bench.
His career ended because of a dirty hit from Matt Cooke.
Yeah he brought a lot to the Flames for our great power play. Not!! Glad that Treviling thought that it would be a good idea. This could be a fun year.
You need to have good players to have a good power play.
You actually hit it straight on the head. He constantly did the drop back passes that the Flames core were not good enough to do. A better core of players Will obviously help, but his innovation is very suspect. He wasn’t willing to change anything due to personnel. One track mind.
Savard took the job with the Flames knowing what he had to work with. Yet he continually deployed a system that obviously didn’t work. That shows a coach with very narrow thinking. Of course it comes down to what personnel you have at hand, Gulutzan is a good example for that. The 2 years he coached the Flames, the PP wasn’t anything to write home about. Now he is a genius.
So is he gifted with smarts, or gifted with talent?
Watching Savard’s deployment all year last year, and what he will most assuredly do this year…
I’m thinking the truth will lie closer to the later
*latter lol
@HockeySenseNot — (And you thought nobody would notice)
:)
Marc Savard’s name is on the Stanley Cup with the Bruins from 2011.