Sturm discusses path to Bruins coaching debut in sitdown with NHL.com

BOSTON -- Marco Sturm found his future in the in-between time, when he was done playing, but had not yet looked beyond. He had come home to his family, in Florida, after his final year of playing in 2012-13, come back to regular dad life, and started coaching his son’s youth hockey team, before moving on to prep school.

Which was when, without expecting it, he hit on his new path.

He was coaching with a pair of former Florida Panthers, Tomas Vokoun and Radek Dvorak, all of them both underqualified and overqualified to lead the team. He remembers what they said.

“These guys are like, ‘Oh wow, you’re a coach,” Sturm recalled in a sitdown with NHL.com last week. “And I felt it too. I just had fun. I don’t know, the way I’m on the ice, off the ice, I don’t know. I think from that point on it kind of clicked.”

He reached out to the national team in his native Germany, not because he expected to be handed anything, not because he thought he was ready. He simply wanted to be involved.

“Then all of a sudden [they] offered me that [head coach] job, like caught me off guard totally, but I also -- because I had that little experience with prep school and the hockey thing and the coaching -- I didn’t hesitate,” Sturm said. “I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ Because I knew I will be good at it. Right away, I was confident enough that I can do it.”

It’s that confidence, that sureness in his own skills, his own ability, that suffuses Sturm’s words. He knew. He knew. He knew that he could be a head coach in the National Hockey League. And so he set out, single-minded in his pursuit of the goal, with no other options.

“When he decided to be a coach, he threw himself into it,” said Geoff Ward, who both coached Sturm on the Boston Bruins and served as an assistant coach under him on the German national team.

“He’s a very goal-oriented person and that was certainly one of his goals. He would talk about it and you knew that’s what he wanted to do.

“He marked out his path and he went along it, and now here he is.”

Sturm spent seven seasons in Los Angeles, between his work as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Kings and as a head coach with the Ontario Reign of the American Hockey League, seven years away from his family while his kids were in middle and high school, seven years taking big and little steps toward becoming the coach he knew he could and should be.

He achieved that goal on June 5, when the Bruins opted to make Sturm the 30th head coach in their history, handing him the reins to a team in transition, a team whose history and run of recent success has left it searching for an identity and a new era.

That new era kicks off on Wednesday, when Sturm, veteran of 938 NHL games over 14 seasons, will stand behind the bench as head coach of his first, against the Washington Capitals at Capital One Arena (7:30 p.m. ET; HBO MAX, TNT).

It’s a moment, he admitted on Tuesday, that he expects to be “emotional.” But it is also, he believes, a moment he’s ready for, beginning this second career with a calm, unshakeable certainty in himself.

“I’m confident enough that I’m going to do the best that I can and be the same Marco Sturm that I’ve always been,” Sturm said on his first day of training camp. “At the end of the day, I want to get better. I want to get my players better. I want to win.”

* * * *

Coaching was not something he had ever really thought about before, not something that most who had coached him or played with him or seen him in his playing days had thought was his destiny. None of them saw this coming. (Or almost none.)

“I don’t think so,” former Boston Bruins coach Claude Julien said.

“I agree with what Claude said, I don’t know when he made the decision that he wanted to be a coach, but we never talked about it,” Ward said.

“No, no idea,” former teammate Dennis Seidenberg said.

“Honestly, as a teammate, I never thought he would be a coach,” former teammate Nate Thompson said.

Apprised of those statements, Sturm considered. He agreed. He didn’t think so either.

There is one person who could see it, though. Sturm remembers a conversation with his former teammate Shawn Thornton, when the pair were hanging out with a neighbor in Florida. The friend said that he, too, couldn’t see Sturm as a head coach.

Thornton disagreed.

“He’s like, damn right he is,” Sturm said. “So I ask him how come? He’s like, you don’t even realize how [much of] a leader you were as a player. I was not vocal. But he said, like, we all looked up to you.”

It was, for Sturm, simply natural.

Thornton confirmed the conversation in a text message. As he recalled, “I said it because Marco was always such a mature, quiet leader that managed people in the locker room well. Thought the game well. Had zero ego.”

He started as coach of the German national team, in 2015-16, a position even he admits he wasn’t quite ready to take on, but he didn’t hesitate.

He looked back, to Julien, to Ward, to coaches he had played under in the NHL, recalling ways of teaching, drills. He built his own system, adding in experienced voices, like Ward, to help him along, culminating in a silver medal for Germany at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, a massive moment for a country that had not won a hockey medal since West Germany took bronze in 1976.

It had been a steady path to that point, as he set out to ensure his own success, his own opportunities for professional development. He decided to do the same.

“I saw other coaches -- good coaches, like really good coaches -- volunteer, hey, can I be around for a month or a week or two, even for Bayern Munich, and they always allowed it,” Sturm said. “So I was always curious about that.

“I think I’m a goal-getter. I heard that name before and I like it. That’s why I say it. If I have something in mind, I really go for it, and I’m all in.”

He had gone to the draft, paying his own way, just to see people, to take meetings. He had remained in touch with Bill Guerin, then with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and John Hynes and Ward, then with the New Jersey Devils. He asked if he could come, listen, learn, build the foundation he might need when -- not if -- he advanced in the profession, as he had seen those soccer coaches do. He attended the Penguins’ development camp in 2018, acting as a guest instructor.

It wasn’t about learning X’s and O’s. Those, he knew. Instead, Sturm focused on watching coaches, the way they worked, their meeting style, how they handled their players in practice. He was, as Ward put it, “a sponge.”

“I already had the NHL in my mind,” Sturm said. “I want to be in this League. And I want to learn as quick as possible. I’m not afraid to do some tough work, dirty work, visiting and going to the minors. I didn’t mind that at all actually.

“But if I have something in mind, I want to get it. I want to get it done.”

He joined Todd McLellan’s staff in Los Angeles, getting experience as an assistant coach in the NHL, learning at the feet of someone he admired. But to become a head coach, Sturm believed, he needed to be a head coach.

“The confidence just grew, right?” he said. “And I was really confident and that’s why I made that step to the minors because, OK, now I only have one goal, to be a head coach. I don’t want to be an assistant. I really don’t. I’d rather probably go back to Germany and do the national team, I can do [it] in Europe, whatever, but I’m like, I’m going to do everything I can do to be a head coach in the NHL.”

So he headed to the minors, to the American Hockey League, for the first time in his career.

Midway through his second season as the head coach with the AHL’s Ontario Reign, Sturm sat down with Thompson, a player he had come to know as a teammate, as a player when serving as his assistant coach, and now as a member of the same coaching staff. Sturm had been, as Thompson put it, “a big influence on my career and me as a person,” a guiding hand and mentor.

In this moment, back in 2023-24, Thompson’s first year as the Reign’s skills coach, Sturm had intended merely to have a conference, to find out what Thompson might need from him, how he could help with the transition, help aid, as he always had.

“We were talking about everything and he said, ‘Well, what do you need from me?’” Thompson recalled. “And I just said, ‘Marco, I want you to be more you.’”

It was a revelation, a moment that Sturm pointed to, later, as a turning point, as something he took to heart. He had so venerated McLellan, the former coach of the Kings and now coach of the Detroit Red Wings, that too much of McLellan had slipped into what he was trying to do.

“It’s no knock to Todd McLellan -- Todd McLellan’s a great coach -- but I thought at the time he was being like Todd a little bit too much,” Thompson said. “After I talked to him, I just said, just be you. It wasn’t like he was being a bad coach or anything, it was more of his spin on it, his pizzazz, I guess you could say.”

Sturm listened.

“Before I was probably trying to copy Todd, and then my coaches helped me to be back to me because [Thompson] said, you’re brilliant, be yourself, and yes you learned this and this and that from these guys but at the end of the day you have to be yourself,” Sturm said.

They could see him working through the advice, could see him find the fun and the passion, the joking and the hard work, all wrapped together into the person he had always been as a player, the person who helped mold the Bruins culture alongside luminaries like Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron, one of those players that the 2011 Bruins most missed not having on the team that ultimately raised the Stanley Cup.

It's why Reign assistant coach Chris Hajt referred to Sturm as “beloved,” why Ward said his players would “go through the end wall for him,” the way they watched him marry hard work with a fun environment, the care he always showed, the communication, the positivity.

“I think the one thing about Marco is I don’t think he’s changed his personality as a coach [from] when he was a player,” Ward said. “I think that’s probably a really good thing. I think players -- and he played long enough to know -- but if you’re not true to your style as a coach the players see through it pretty quickly.

“I think Marco just kind of grew into the coach he is out of the player that he was.”

* * * *

There is so much confidence when it comes to Sturm. In the man himself, in what he has built in getting to this point, in the future he is creating for himself and for the Bruins. Those who know him best believe he will succeed, believe he will be good at this path he never envisioned until he was already doing it.

But it will not be easy. There is work to do with this Bruins team, a team for which Sturm’s main goal is not winning but growth, at least to start.

The Bruins have been pleased with the way that Sturm has led the team through training camp, a time they have seen be more detailed and more cohesive than it was last season under former coach Jim Montgomery.

“You’ve heard his voice throughout training camp and I think that's really important for our players, to understand that he's in charge of this and he's running it,” general manager Don Sweeney said. “Our guys know who's at the head of the boat in this situation and they're on board. He's going to hold to the standard that he holds himself to and wants to as a coach. He wants to have success. He's going to demand it of each and every one of us.”

It will come from his past, from his passion, his dedication to believing in each of his players, even if that means he’s hard on them, his understanding of when to keep things light and when to “lay the hammer down” well honed, as Thompson explained.

“Marco, he’s played in the NHL for a long time, he’s seen it all,” Thompson said. “He’s played on the fourth line, he’s played on the first line, he’s dealt with injury. He has been a superstar, he’s been a guy that’s played with top lines. He’s seen every single angle of the team. He’s seen it as an assistant coach, he’s seen it as a head coach, he’s seen it in the minors, he’s seen it internationally. I think now he’s a guy that has been in so many different situations that as a player, if you’re that guy, if you have a coach like that … that’s only going to help the player.”

On Tuesday, as his team held their final practice before Sturm’s NHL debut as a coach, he was vocal, directing the practice in a voice that echoed through the empty TD Garden. The control was there, the command, the attention to detail that has been notable throughout training camp.

He will be tasked with getting his team to play hard, to play physical, to exceed expectations that were lowered with last season’s exodus of longtime players. It was not a position he thought he would ever be in.

But here he is, in a job that -- once he decided he wanted it -- he strove for with a laser-like focus.

Once, they didn’t see it. Now, though, they believe.

“I was super impressed with what he did in his time in Ontario and how he developed a lot of those guys that are now on the Kings,” Thompson said. “And I think sky’s the limit for him in the NHL as a head coach.”