Barber was fired and Boucher, who was then 25, was traded; the two departures were directly related.
"I don't know if it was the reason," Boucher said last week. "But it certainly played at least half of the factor as to why I got traded. I think it made it easy to trade me."
When the dust settled, Barber was hired as director of player personnel in Tampa Bay and has done well there, helping the Lightning to a championship.
But Boucher kept stumbling.
It didn't work out for him in Phoenix and neither did a trade to Calgary. He signed with Chicago as a free agent the day before camp began last year, was waived and then picked up by the Columbus Blue Jackets before becoming an free agent in July.
He's had setbacks, injuries, surgeries, rejections and dejection. As summer moved further into the free-agent season, Boucher was going nowhere.
He is 30 now, the father of two young children, and he has more than just a career to look out for. So he called Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren and basically asked for a do-over.
Holmgren agreed and signed Boucher to a two-way contract, tagging the goalie who backstopped the Flyers to the seventh game of the 2000 Eastern Conference finals for a job in the AHL. There are not a lot of guys his age and experience who would have done that.
Just as there are not a lot of teams or GMs who would have welcomed him back into the fold. But who better than Holmgren and the Flyers - particularly after last season - to recognize the value in a new beginning.
And so, with the backdrop of a team on the mend, an athlete on the mend has found a home and a start right back where he was in 1997, when he was a rookie in the AHL. As the Flyers start a new season with their first preseason game tonight in Trenton against the New Jersey Devils, Boucher is a quiet presence in the locker room, sitting in a temporary stall and just hoping to get his game back together.
