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Boudreau has coached stacked teams. He has unquestionably had regular season success with those stacked teams. Good for him. Much more salient, to my mind, is that he has been a playoff mediocrity in TWO different cities DESPITE having stacked teams in both cases. I notice that when Therrien has success, you attribute it entirely to superstars (Sid, Price) who are succeeding 'despite' MT. When Boudreau has success, that is clearly the result of his awesome coaching rather than the superstars he's been lucky enough to draw. When MT's teams fail, it's MT's fault. When Boudreau's fail, it's 'bad luck' or the players' fault. This is circular reasoning at its finest. Therrien has been to the Finals, to the Conference Finals twice, and four times to the second round, along with three divisional championships. He also took over a disastrous Habs team and coached it to first place in the Northeast. Considering the talent differential between MT's teams and Boudreau's, I'd call that at least comparable. The simple fact is that Therrien in NO WAY has a pattern of getting far worse results than his team's talent level would lead one to expect. Boudreau does. Whoever hired Boudreau can keep him. If you put the two c.v.s side by side, the rational GM would pick Therrien.

Where in there is my Cup?

I'm good with this:

Actually the curfew was the last straw. He refused to honour his first contract and went home. when he left Nashville they were like "good riddance to bad rubbish" They never offered him a contract.

The draft is the furthest thing from an exact science, which is why I think 95% of the discourse around draft day is sheer wind. There is no point - NONE - in raking over the coals of why we took player X instead of player Y back in 2003 or whatever it was. All you can ask from your organization is that, over time, is shows itself to be reliably effective in drafting quality NHLers. You really have to look at the aggregate rather than the particulars when it comes to drafting. Every team has plenty of examples it can point to where they 'should have' picked a different guy.

Therrien's resume is far better than Boudreau's. He's been to the Finals. He's gotten out of the first round with some reliability. And he too has taken a team that was a bottom-feeder and turned it around overnight. There is simply no rational reason, based on career achievement, to favour Boudreau over Therrien. But then again, the anti-Therrien sentiment left reason behind a long time ago.