Ask any player when they return to play their former team for the first time and they’ll tell you that it feels a little different. There’s a reason for that. Instead of making themselves at home in the home locker room, they instead are lacing up their skates in another dressing room down the hall.
The feeling is the same thing for a coach, as Claude Julien alluded to hours before his first game at TD Garden since starting his second tenure with the Montreal Canadiens.
“You don’t coach 10 years without getting to know the people here that work in the buildings and stuff like that, and I’ve always had a good relationship with them,” Julien said to a sea of reporters following the Habs optional skate Wednesday on Causeway St.