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For the second year in a row, the Boston Bruins, very much in the clear of a playoff spot with a month left in their season, crumbled down the stretch and fell out of the playoff picture on the last day of the regular season. In both collapses, all the Bruins needed was a victory (and a little bit of help) and they were in. Even when the help came with a Detroit Red Wings loss to the New York Rangers on Saturday, the Bruins were too busy getting their teeth kicked in a by a 38-win Ottawa Senators club in an eventual 6-1 final to make it count. But for the second year in a row, I’m here to tell you that the Black and Gold should absolutely, 100 percent
not fire their head coach,
Claude Julien.
In the moments that follow a loss and early exit, especially for the second year in a row, elicit an emotional response. So, to see the public outcry calling for Julien’s head was not unexpected. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right. Or even wrong, for that matter.
But when I look at Julien’s year, I thought this was a coach that seemed more deserving of a Jack Adams nomination than one that deserves a pink slip given what he did with this roster.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle of either thought process.
It begins with an offseason that seemed up-and-down as could be. Either through free agency or trades, the Boston front office combo of general manager Don Sweeney and president Cam Neely moved on from No. 2 defenseman
Dougie Hamilton, top-line winger
Milan Lucic, and second-line winger
Reilly Smith. They also lost third-line center
Carl Soderberg, and (on a more minor note) fourth-line grinders Gregory Campbell and Danny Paille.
They were replaced with
Matt Beleskey,
Jimmy Hayes,
Zac Rinaldo,
Joonas Kemppainen,
Matt Irwin, and
Colin Miller. Beleskey, a heart-and-soul type that gave you everything he had this year, finished his first year in Boston with 15 goals and a career-high 37 points in 80 games played. Hayes scored a grand total of zero goals in his final 16 games of the season, and just two in his last 31 overall. Rinaldo and Kemppainen made their last NHL appearance on Feb. 28, while Miller bounced between Boston and Providence. And Irwin? That guy lasted just two games before he was banished to the American Hockey League for the year.
Still, with literally no one with the exception of Beleskey, whose $3.8 million salary was a better fit than Lucic’s $6 million, matching the production of the guy they were brought in to replace in stats or viable presence, the B’s were a win away from their eighth postseason berth in nine years of Julien hockey.
While the front office failed, the coach
nearly thrived.
It was always impossible for the Bruins to replace a guy like Hamilton off the bat, too, so the front office’s inability to find that next player last summer shouldn’t damn them as a group. The B’s obviously tried when they acquired picks on picks on picks to make a play for Massachusetts native
Noah Hanifin, too, on that fateful Friday draft night in Florida. But once that failed, it was basically over unless the Bruins were willing to commit several years and even more dollars to a free agent like Andrej Sekera or Cody Franson, two older options that while solid, didn’t necessarily match Hamilton overall.
So the Bruins tried a defense-by-committee. That led to a rotation that included a ridiculous 11 different defensemen -- including four with under 70 NHL games played in Tommy Cross, Miller, Joe Morrow, and Zach Trotman -- dressed for the Bruins this season, and a rotation that
still didn’t have a solidified six by the 60th, 70th, or 80th game of the regular season. The overall lack of impactful depth on the Boston point especially stood out when the 35-year-old
John-Michael Liles stepped into the mix and was already one of the club’s best defensemen after just a few games in a Boston sweater.
The strain put on Julien -- a coach that’s always prided himself on a strong own-zone game -- to make it work with such a mix-and-matched defensive unit was obvious when the competition stiffened. Julien was forced to operate in a ‘win now’ mindset while he also attempted to develop some of the club’s aforementioned young defenders into everyday NHLers. A juggling act worthy of its own circus tent.
Still, Julien brought the Bruins within one victory of a postseason berth.
The B’s had one foot in rebuild/retool, and one foot in contention. The Liles and
Lee Stempniak acquisitions -- with multiple draft picks and a low-end prospect (Anthony Camara) shipped out of town in an attempt to bolster the Boston roster for a potential playoff run -- made that painfully apparent.
That develop-but-win strain bled into the club’s offensive game, too.
Although the Bruins finished with some of their best offensive numbers (and a ridiculously strong power play for most of the season), they still lacked the same finishing touch they did the year prior.
Hayes was not even close to Smith in terms of production, and that’s saying a lot given the way Smith basically napped through all of his second season in town.
Brett Connolly wasn’t Smith, either, as he struggled to produce with
Brad Marchand and
Patrice Bergeron as a complementary piece of Boston’s best combo. The Bruins got worthwhile production from youngsters like
David Pastrnak (who is still -- believe it or not -- just a teenager and cannot yet be relied upon as the face of the offensive attack), and college free agent pickups
Noel Acciari and
Frank Vatrano. But Pastrnak struggled to stay healthy for the Black and Gold, and Acciari and Vatrano’s success came after the Bruins had already committed too much time and energy towards squeezing something, anything out of a Connolly, Hayes, Kemppainen, and Rinaldo among others.
Some of that falls on the coach, obviously; Hayes
still skating on the second power-play unit in March or Connolly
still with the Bergeron-Marchand combo in February stick out as obvious too-little-too-late-for-too-long mistakes from Julien. But some of that falls on a front office that kept the club’s capable young guns in the minors for further seasoning while the NHL club struggled. You understand the method to it, of course, but Julien can’t dress guys that aren’t there on his roster.
And the Bruins didn’t even cut bait when it came to some of their dead weight -- namely Kemppainen, Rinaldo, and veteran forward Max Talbot -- until their Feb. 29 waiver wire demotions down to the AHL.
Still, and again, Julien brought this Bruins club within one win of the playoffs.
But the stink that surrounds Julien’s future in Boston obviously centers around the way the Black and Gold have straight-up melted when it’s mattered the most for two consecutive seasons. In their final gasps of an unsuccessful 2014-15 campaign, the Bruins fell by way of a 5-5-4 record in the final 14 games of the season (14 of a possible 28 points). It got worse this year, though, with a 3-8-1 (just seven of a possible 24 points) finish to Boston’s season, the worst in the NHL over that stretch. The Bruins, at one point in first place in the Atlantic Division, out-tanked the league’s tanking groups.
That’s a problem. So you naturally look at the coach and wonder if his message is getting across to the players in that room. The room’s leaders say it is, and Bergeron has consistently reiterated that Julien is the best coach he’s ever had, so if there is, you have to wonder if the disconnect comes in the trickle-down effect from coach to leaders to everyone else. It’s plausible. For most of these players in that room, Julien has been the only NHL coach they’ve known. At a certain point, especially after two deep Cup runs in 2011 and 2013, you’ve heard every speech and every motivational tool in his book.
This happens to almost every coach in every sport. Hell, it happened in Boston when the Boston Red Sox -- led by their high-priced veteran players -- ultimately ran over Terry Francona en route to a devastating collapse out of the postseason picture. Francona had won two World Series in just eight seasons in town, but was still determined to be the problem. Things
actually got worse when the Sox found Francona’s replacement,
Bobby Valentine, in a sideshow act that plagued 2012.
The job duties of a baseball manager versus an NHL coach are vastly different, of course, but the Valentine saga and what it did to the Red Sox has more than enough juice as the lone pure cautionary tale needed for a Boston front office left to look high and low for answers for the second spring in a row.
An emotionally charged reaction that puts a coach of Julien’s caliber on the open market, and with a sexy name (
Mike Milbury, for some insane reason, continues to pop up) propped up into his place behind the Boston bench and your franchise becomes a joke, and your team becomes even worse.
One wrong call -- and that’s really all it takes when you’re talking about a head coaching change -- and those unbearable, unacceptable 96-point and 93-point non-playoff campaigns become longed for.
And that’s something the Bruins would be wise to realize before it’s Julien’s next team that’s the one keeping them more than just one victory away from reaching the postseason.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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