Bruce Boudreau admits that he knows he is on the hot seat.

If you look around the National Hockey League right now there are a number of players and executives alike that could be considered to be on the hot seat. The hot seat is a term reserved for someone that is either at risk of, or on the verge of, potentially losing their jobs if their lack of success continues and in the 2019 - 2020 NHL regular season thus far there may be no seat hotter than the one belonging to Minnesota Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau.

Not only are the Minnesota Wild currently underachieving in terms of the expectations that they had before them prior to the start of the regular season, but Boudreau has the unfortunate distinction of being among the few coaches around the National Hockey League that was not hired by the general manager that he currently works under. In fact Boudreau wasn't even hired by the last guy that held the job, that being general manager Paul Fenton, but instead was hired two general manager's ago by former long time Wild general manager Chuck Fletcher. There are many that suspect that newly appointed general manager Bill Guerin will want to hire his own guy sooner rather than later, and if the results continue to trend in their urrent direction that may come very soon indeed. 

This week the embattled had coach acknowledged that things were not looking good for him.

“It’s going to be out there,” Boudreau said as per the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a winning league. If you don’t win, bad things happen.”

In his defense Boudreau has had to pick up the pieces of the catastrophic era that was Paul Fenton's tenure as general manager of the Minnesota Wild. Although there is legitimate reason to point the finger at Fenton for the team's currently lack of success however it seems very likely that Boudreau will end up being the scapegoat eventually. Boudreau knows though and says he has not bothered focusing on it due to the fact that it would simply drive him insane given the current results.

“I can’t control anything that’s happening, so I just go on. If I worried about that every day, I’d be a basket case,” said Boudreau. “So you just go, ‘Whatever happens, happens,’ and I think we’re capable of doing better than where we are right now and hopefully we do.”

I must admit I would feel somewhat bad for Boudreau given the poor hand he was dealt by the aforementioned Paul Fenton, but on the other side of that coin I can understand why a first time NHL general manager like Bill Guerin would want to give his own guy a chance at running the bench for the Minnesota Wild.