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Dynasty to Ruins: The Sudden Fall of the Bruins

April 25, 2016, 2:10 PM ET [107 Comments]
Ty Anderson
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • RSSArchiveCONTACT
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Five years ago, the Boston Bruins were en route to a ride that took them to the top of the hockey world.

The Bruins would survive a seven-game war (jam-packed with overtimes) with the Montreal Canadiens in the first round, sweep the Philadelphia Flyers, outlast the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games, and overcome their second 0-2 hole of the postseason, this time in the Stanley Cup Final against a ridiculously loaded Vancouver Canucks group, to capture their first Stanley Cup since 1972.

Again, top of the world.

And though the Bruins won it all on the back of an all-world season from Tim Thomas (whose start-to-finish performance remains the single craziest thing I’ve ever experienced as a hockey fan), the Bruins had all the pieces in place to contend for the next five, maybe even 10, years.

Their core -- Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Milan Lucic, Brad Marchand up front, and captain Zdeno Chara, Johnny Boychuk, and even Dennis Seidenberg -- were all either entering or already in the absolute prime of their NHL careers. Even behind the nearly 40-year-old Thomas, the Bruins had Tuukka Rask, a goaltender then just one year removed from the league’s best save percentage and goals against average. Tyler Seguin was the teenage prize of the once-debated Kessel-to-Toronto trade. And the third pick sent to Boston in that jackpot trade, franchise d-man Dougie Hamilton, would be drafted by the club just days after a victory parade that brought a million people into Boston.

The Bruins, who ‘tanked’ for just two seasons (2005-06 and 2006-07), had a ridiculously strong core and supporting cast in the now, and had franchise cornerstone pieces of tomorrow in Hamilton, Rask, and Seguin that were in a pipeline and system that would not need to rush their development.

Somehow, it all went wrong. And now, the Bruins, just five years removed from this position of ultimate strength, are not talking about a dynasty, but rather how they can return to the postseason after failing to even qualify, in a league where 16-of-30 teams make it every year, for the last two seasons.

How the hell did this happen?

Of that aforementioned core, Bergeron, Krejci, and Marchand remain. Chara and Seidenberg have aged, as all humans do, and are no longer the feared one-two punch they were back then. Seguin lasted just three seasons in Boston. The same for Hamilton. Rask, with a huge contract and no confirmation that he’s one of the club’s ‘untouchable’ pieces (Bergeron is the only player with that tag), could be next.

(Imagine a team trading away a franchise center, franchise defenseman, and franchise goaltender in a four-year span? It’s almost impossible, I know, but this club is now just one step away from that.)

The blame game has been an epic one, too. Some point to a team president that’s overseen the trades of countless young stars in Cam Neely. Others have pointed towards horrific cap management from former general manager Peter Chiarelli. It’s even easier to point the finger at a scouting department that sold the B’s on misses or long-term projects in almost six years of drafting. It’s all bad.

This has been, in the simplest of terms, mismanagement to the highest degree.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH

First, let’s talk about the perceived problem with young players in Boston. It really began with Kessel. A gifted goal-scorer, Kessel’s three-zone game -- and even his strength -- was always something B’s coach Claude Julien wanted to see improve. But Kessel’s trade out of town was more cap-related than anything else, and the return sent to Boston made sense when it came to making that trade. The Seguin trade was really fueled by off-ice issues that scared the hell out of the club, and Hamilton did not want to be here. Why he didn’t want to be here, however, remains a complete mystery. That’s telling.

Hindsight is of course all too easy when it came to the Seguin trade. And while I think it’s fair to judge the quickness with which the Bruins dumped Seguin at the first sign of danger (versus the way the Chicago Blackhawks stuck it out with Patrick Kane’s off-ice issues four years ago), the real criticism should come with the fact that the Bruins just did not get enough of a return in that trade. Loui Eriksson was a fair headline piece, but the other ‘young talents’ the Bruins plucked from the Stars -- Matt Fraser, Joe Morrow, and Smith -- did or have done almost nothing in Boston.

In fact, only Morrow, primarily a seventh defenseman for the Bruins this year, remains with the club. Unless of course the Bruins pony up the years and money to Eriksson, a pending free agent, this summer. So while Seguin seems primed for 90-point years for the next decade, the Bruins’ final return could quite possibly read Jimmy Hayes and Joe Morrow by the time the puck drops on the 2016 season.

But in regards to the young talents shipped out of town, there’s something to be said about players like Blake Wheeler (2011) and Reilly Smith (2015), who struggle to find their footing here, but switch cities and evolve into leaders and top-six talents. Is it utilization by their new coach versus Julien? Is it a system issue? Or is that the expectations in Boston are impossibly high, by both the coach and the fans, that a move to a different city -- Atlanta/Winnipeg in the case of Wheeler and Florida in the case of Smith -- allow a more complete and mistake-tolerant development path? The Wheeler trade made the Bruins better in the sense that they acquired a veteran piece that allowed them to become a more complete team throughout their playoff runs in Rich Peverley, but the Smith for Jimmy Hayes trade really said more about an organization’s unwillingness to wait it out with a young player on the verge of a substantial raise (Smith’s cap-hit was set to go up to $3.425 million in ‘15-16).

It’s also alarming when a guy like Hamilton, a player the Bruins were interested in paying close-to-top dollar for (rumors have varied from $30-33 million dollars over a five or six-year deal), essentially says he’d rather go somewhere for less than play for your franchise and forces your hand.

Comfort is comfort, of course, but does this happen in cities with good locker rooms and strong player-coach relationships? I don’t know. And even as somebody around the team before and after every game, and numerous practices, I can’t tell you of the ‘health’ of that locker room. I, nor any reporter, is in there when it matters most. I do know guys in that room said this year’s team felt more ‘together’ and on the same page, which would hint at guys like a Hamilton or a Smith not necessarily being on the same page as the leaders. And if you have a disconnect between your young guns of tomorrow and the leaders of your team, that’s a definite problem that won’t go away with tweaks.

DON’T SWALLOW THE CAP

Along with their issues with keeping young stars in town, the Bruins struggled to manage the cap. Sometimes, and by sometimes I of course mean often, the two paths intersected.

The Kessel trade? Cap related. Even when they moved Aaron Ward out of town and immediately bought out the return in that trade, Patrick Eaves, in a trade will never ever in a million years make sense to me, they still couldn’t find a suitable contract for the Kessel camp. The Seguin trade? Though not 100 percent cap related, undoubtedly involved his contract going from entry-level to nearly $6 million per season. The Bruins, understandably so, did not feel like paying Smith more than double his salary after a listless 13-goal campaign in his second year with the team.

The Chiarelli Era had more highs than lows for the Bruins, especially with the club’s on-ice product, but one overwhelming problem lingered, even after Chiarelli’s exit, and it actually may have been one of the main reasons for his exit. That was his love for ‘his guys’. Chiarelli often traded for his former Ottawa talents, and re-signed his Boston guys to slightly above market value on a fairly routine basis.

Sometimes, the Bruins recovered or found a way to make it work.

Other times, oh my goodness, was it ugly.

It’s hard to keep a Cup-contending team in a friendly cap situation, too, and everybody knows it. The Chicago Blackhawks, who have been forced to sell off assets after nearly every one of their three Cups since 2010, can attest to that. One of the reasons the Hawks have been so strapped in terms of their cap comes back to heavy $10.5 million per year contracts for both Kane and do-it-all-center Jonathan Toews. They count for nearly 30% of the Chicago cap. But Boston’s version of this combination -- Bergeron and Seguin -- was set to count against the B’s cap combined in at under $11 million, and then later at just under $13 million. That extra $8 million or so prevents the catastrophic cap-crunch like the one the Blackhawks have repeatedly gone through, and will continue to go through moving forward.

And when the dust cleared on the Seguin trade, Jarome Iginla, who nixed a trade to the Black and Gold just months earlier, came to the Bruins in search of his first Stanley Cup. It was the perfect one-year deal for Iginla and the Black and Gold. Iginla would count against the Boston cap for just $1.8 million, but his contract could have been worth up to $6 million in bonuses. Most of that bonus money was a simple games played bonus, too, so the cap crunch was merely inevitable. Iginla made another $3.75 million in bonus money alone by the time he appeared in just 10 games for the Bruins. One year of Iginla cost you just $250,000 less than it would have to have kept Seguin at his $5.75 million.

That, along with some other minor bonus overages that came against Boston’s cap the following season, was the impetus for the trade that saw the Bruins trade their No. 2 defenseman, Johnny Boychuk, to the New York Islanders for picks just to begin the year under the cap.

This was a product of overpayments to bottom-six talents -- in no world should your fourth-line center (Gregory Campbell) count against your cap for $1.6 million, nor should you commit four years to over-30 guys with physically taxing roles like the Bruins did with Chris Kelly and Seidenberg -- and the Bruins paid for it by putting an end to their Stanley Cup window with a thinned out, aging defense.

Was a Presidents’ Trophy and second-round exit worth the mess that followed? Probably not.

On multiple occasions, the Bruins were forced to go bargain bin hunting. Miroslav Satan was the Kessel replacement in 2009-10. Simon Gagne, after a year away from hockey, beat out Ville Leino, based on pulse alone I think, for a spot on the 2014-15 roster as the club’s low-risk, high-reward Hail Mary attempt on an Iginla replacement. Matt Irwin was the last gamble, signed to a one-year, show-me contract in an effort to replace Hamilton by bodies alone (the Bruins rolled with eight defensemen on their NHL roster for almost all of this past season). It’s worth noting, too, that neither Gagne nor Irwin finished their respective seasons in a Boston sweater.

When these pieces didn’t work, Chiarelli and the Bruins often mortgaged pieces of their murky future (draft picks) on gambles like Brett Connolly (nine goals in 76 games for Boston), Andrej Meszaros (a healthy scratch for most of the 2014 playoffs), Joe Corvo (a disaster). This wasn’t a Chiarelli alone trait, though, as Don Sweeney traded a combined four draft picks to acquire over-30 free-agents-to-be J.M. Liles and Lee Stempniak this past trade deadline.

In fact, Sweeney’s first year in Boston came with some Chiarelli-esque happenings. Sweeney traded Hamilton to Calgary, and helped clear up some of the B’s cap issues with a trade that sent Milan Lucic -- expected to ask for $7 million or maybe even more in a re-sign with Boston -- to the Los Angeles Kings, though the Bruins bit the bullet and ate $2.75 million of Lucic’s $6 million salary.

But on that same day, Sweeney re-signed Adam McQuaid to a four-year deal worth $11 million, or in other words, gave one of Boston’s “good soldiers” a substantial raise for one or two too many years. And while I thought McQuaid put forth one of his best years yet in Year One of this contract, it’s tough to believe that the Bruins could not have found or developed a better (read as: more affordable) option by the end of this deal, much like they’re most likely trying to in the case of Seidenberg this summer.

ROUGH DRAFT

But replacing the players you’ve routinely overpaid to keep in town, or finding internal options other than these washed up veterans has always seemed tough for the Black and Gold. And why is that? Well, because as mentioned, their drafting was straight-up abysmal for entirely too long.

The go-to pick that’s just hammered by people is the selection of Zach Hamill with the eighth overall pick in 2007. Logan Couture went just one pick after that. Ryan McDonagh went four after Hamill, and Kevin Shattenkirk went six. The list goes on and on, too. Of their entire 2007 draft class, which included six players in total, only Hamill and Tommy Cross have suited up for an NHL game. Hamill skated in 20, while Cross has played in three. 23 games. Twenty-three.

The 2008 class has 306 games of NHL experience in total between four players -- Joe Colborne, Michael Hutchinson, Max Sauve, and Jamie Arniel -- but just two of those 306 total games came with the Bruins, both one-game stints for Arniel and Sauve.

Boston’s crown jewel of their five-player 2009 class was Jordan Caron, though Tyler Randell, who scored six goals in an extremely limited role, could surpass Caron’s impact with the Bruins if he’s given another chance to role with the big club next season. A daunting task, I know.

2010 had a gimme in Seguin, but beyond that, Jared Knight, selected 32nd overall, hasn’t panned out into a solid pro player. But there’s hope with Ryan Spooner, Zane McIntyre, and Zach Trotman. The 2011 class had its gimme in Hamilton, too, and while the Bruins had more misses than hits (Alexander Khokhlachev, Anthony Camara), defenseman Rob O’Gara stands out as a potential win from that class.

The jury is still out on from the 2012 class and on, though I think you have to like the progress of Boston’s drafts as a whole since the club made the switch to Keith Gretzky as their head of scouting.

But for years, this inability to draft and develop almost anybody outside their Top-10 picks killed them.

“I think for a period of time we stopped being in an invest mode running with the guys we had,” Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs admitted at his year-end press conference at TD Garden last week. “You pay a price in this game if you’re not constantly investing in the next generation.”

On top of a seemingly improved draft game, the Bruins have attempted to bolster their organizational depth with college free agents signing like Noel Acciari, Austin Czarnik (a sneaky good addition to the pool), and Frank Vatrano (the talk of Providence this past season).

“The invest mode is looking at where your draft picks are, how they’ve evolved, whether they’ve been successful or not and seeing that you’re moving that next generation into your game,” Jacobs continued, “so that when you have cap issues, as we have had, that you’re not forced into the position that we’ve been put into as has been explained to me by having to make some serious changes with regard to the personnel that you have and the characters you have on your team.”

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

The blame game is pointless. You can blame Julien. You can blame Chiarelli. You can blame Neely. You can blame an entire scouting department if you’d like. There’s no right answer, and there’s no wrong answer. It all comes back to the camp you’ve set up shop in. But I think your easiest -- and likely correct answer -- is that everybody involved in that front office, and on the ice for that matter, has played a part in this fall back down to the middle of the pack for the hometown team on Causeway.

Deep down, I do believe that Sweeney, who had an extensive background in organizational development before becoming the club’s general manager last spring, has a plan that will work for the Bruins if it’s given the proper time it needs. A general manager absolutely needs more than two years on the job to put his true stamp -- from signings to draft picks and everything in between -- on a team.

But if this team sputters for a third straight season, heads will roll. That’s a fact.

And if they do, is Sweeney on the chopping block? Not before the team president at the helm since 2010 or the head coach behind the bench since 2007, I wouldn’t think, but who’s to say that a new boss doesn’t come in and just simply clear house? And therein lies the concern for the Bruins moving forward. A panic move does nothing but move everybody involved a little closer to the unemployment line, but it’s clear that something has to change when it comes to this team, especially after a second straight collapse out of postseason play. So there’s immense pressure on this group. And if the front office still believes in Julien, which they still do, at least from all indications from both Sweeney and Neely, it becomes an issue of giving the coach the tools (read as: players) to make it work in Boston.

SO HOW DO YOU FIX IT?

It’s the million dollar question in Boston. ‘Cause it’s almost impossible to answer.

It’s actually rather remarkable that of all the trades and decisions the Bruins have made, that it’s the Hamilton trade that’s the only one that’s seemed to have royally screwed the club. The Bruins could use a player of Seguin’s caliber, of course, but you’d be crazy to legitimately believe that he’s the player he is now if he’s not traded out of Boston. Seguin himself would tell you that, too. This team, above all else, needs to find that heir apparent to the almost 40-year-old Chara. (Again.) And in the worst way.

When you look at how the Bruins struggled this past season, it ultimately came back to a defensive group that featured one No. 1 d-man -- who might be a better fit as a No. 2 at this point in his career -- and a hodgepodge of No. 4 and 5 defenders. The free agent market has some stopgap options -- Brian Campbell, Alex Goligoski, and Jason Demers stand out as potential fits in Boston -- but it’s not the home run the Bruins need if they’re serious about their future No. 1. They need a guy like the ones you heard about again and again this season, whether it comes from Anaheim, Minnesota, or elsewhere.

But hey, you know who else is looking for a high-end, young defenseman under team control and/or with a semi-affordable contract in the now? The entire league. The Bruins will have heavy competition in this race -- the Colorado Avalanche, Los Angeles Kings, and Detroit Red Wings are just a few teams that will scour the market high and low -- and to make it work, they may have to part with yet another piece of the core that brought this city so much joy and promise just five undeniably long years ago.

That same core you thought was going to remain intact for multiple Stanley Cup runs.

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.
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