"Tar," said the squat, steel-framed coach. "I could smell the hot roofing tar. When you've worked with it, you never forget it, eh? It stays with you . . . you smell it, and you think about your past. You see those guys up there doing that job and, absolutely, it makes you thankful for what you've got."
A defenseman in his playing days, a roofer by trade, born into a family-owned business that his dad, Marcel, began decades ago, Julien less than two weeks ago was appointed the latest tradesman to work the hockey bench under the Garden roof.
As repair jobs go, this one could prove to be his most challenging, and based on the many who have slipped here in the past, perhaps his most treacherous.
"I am not saying that I am coming in as a savior," Julien said during a wide-ranging telephone conversation last week that lasted some 90 minutes. "But I know Boston is a great hockey city, and the fans are passionate about the sport. It would be great to help the team to get back that feeling of excitement, for everyone to be charged up about hockey again. I'd love to be part of that."
Only time will tell if Julien, a career minor league defenseman who says he started his coaching career "almost by accident," can right a sport that has gone wrong here for the better part of a decade and a half.
By all accounts, including his own, Julien is not a man prone to yelling or screaming. Calm to the point of stoicism behind the bench, he is nonetheless considered a demanding and structured taskmaster. No doubt his approach will be a sharp contrast to the mild-mannered and gregarious Dave Lewis, whose greatest fault in his one year behind the Boston bench may have been that he took at faith the job description that referred to his workers as "professional" hockey players. Lewis, along with associate coach Marc Habscheid, miscalculated the players' ability to figure out the game for themselves, in terms of playing strategies, game-to-game commitment, and work ethic.
