Be sure to 'like' Hockeybuzz on Facebook!
It’s always a weird feeling when the Boston Bruins fail to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
While their postseason success has varied year to year, the Black and Gold have failed to make the postseason just five times since 1968. That was until this year’s 96-point finish -- though the most by any non-playoff club in NHL history -- put the B’s in ninth place in the Eastern Conference and out of the running for Lord Stanley to the eighth-seed Pittsburgh Penguins by just two points made it six.
For many of the B’s core pieces, this is the first time that the playoffs have gone on without them, and it was the D-word that resonated through the Boston locker room on their break-up day at TD Garden.
“It’s not very surprising, it’s more disappointing. We all know what we’ve got here,” Boston center
David Krejci admitted in his year-end meeting today. “Obviously we didn’t deliver this season, and that’s why we’re talking here on April 13th. It’s obviously not a good feeling, but it is what it is.”
By now, you know every which way the Black and Gold struggled in 2014-15 -- from the players to the often baffling personnel decisions and to the front office decisions that rarely seemed to put the B’s in anything close to a position of strength -- but it’s the future that was on everyone’s mind.
“I’d like to kind of transition the puck better. Now you can do that in a number of different ways. Player personnel-wise, coaching-wise and that’s something I’d like to do better,” B’s general manager
Peter Chiarelli said. “From that flows my next thing is scoring. We were deficient in that area, but we had as I said on Friday, we had almost just a little short of chances—five percent chances on the year and we just didn’t execute them. That can be personnel related also. It can be some other adjustments too. Those are the two things that fit in my mind right now.”
Chiarelli has ideas for fixing the Bruins, sure, but whether he’ll be the one around to make those changes, however, remains to be seen. And despite the murky future, Chiarelli was honest and said that he’ll continue to operate as if things were ‘normal’ -- meaning he still has a job -- until told otherwise.
“It’s business as usual and we started conducting the exit interviews at nine this morning and we still have a bunch of them left. We’ve talked to some of them,” Chiarelli said. “The job uncertainty, the questions surrounding us, it’s part of the job that you have to do and just move forward. But it hasn’t impacted my interviews, my discussions, my meetings with Claude [Julien]. Business as usual.”
When pressed about when he’ll have a better idea of where both he and Julien stand with the organization, Chiarelli said, “I couldn’t tell you. As I said, business as usual until we hear otherwise.”
Julien, who has coached to the Bruins to three 100-point-or-more seasons and two Stanley Cup Finals (including a Cup win in 2011) in eight years in Boston, echoed Chiarelli’s sentiments.
“I’ve had exit interviews today with players and my job continues just like any other year,” admitted Julien. “I’ve been here for eight years and I enjoy being here and certainly look forward to staying here, but again having said that I also understand the nature of this business.”
And although the Bruins struggled to roll with positive momentum outside of bits and spurts over a taxing 82-game grind of relative mediocrity, Julien felt that his players believed in the message.
“I think the players believe in what we’re trying to do here, accomplish as a team. I know we worked hard to put a game plan together and whether that happened all the time or not, I’m really not ready to say it had something to do with the message not being well received,” Julien said. “So, I still feel that the room is strong in there and that our voices are still heard as coaches. So, to me I don’t think that was a real big issue as far as that was concerned. Really felt, and you know, the last game of the season even after we’re out the guys still played hard right until the end, so I don’t think there was a thing there that indicated to me that the players, I know what the question is, tuned me out more or less.”
Moving forward, the Black and Gold have a long list of offseason priorities, and while many remain up in the air, the club did confirm that two more members of the 2011 Cup team were on the way out.
Center
Gregory Campbell and forward
Danny Paille, two former staples of the Bruins’ beloved Merlot Line with Shawn Thornton from 2010 to 2014, will not be re-signed by the club.
“It’s been a wonderful time,” Paille, acquired from the Buffalo Sabres back in 2009, said of his time with the Bruins. “Obviously it’s not a season that I’d like it to end to, but it’s been wonderful, and if it continues, great, but I think when I look back here, we competed for a number of years and played some good hockey. It’s been a tremendous time, and it’s unfortunate we ended the season the way we did, but overall, it’s been a great experience and I couldn’t ask for anything better.”
In six seasons with the Bruins, the 30-year-old Paille tallied 50 goals and 95 points in 375 games. He also added nine goals and 19 points in 74 playoff games with the Black and Gold.
With Campbell, exiting Boston comes on the heels of what was undeniably his worst year as a Bruin since coming over with Nathan Horton in a trade with Florida in 2010, as the veteran pivot finished the year as one of the worst possession players in the entire NHL. But Campbell gave the Bruins a couple of solid years as their fourth-line center, and will always receive a warm reception in visits back to Boston for his now infamous shift that saw him muscle through a broken leg sustained on a blocked Evgeni Malkin blast on a penalty kill in Game 3 of the 2013 Eastern Conference Finals against Pittsburgh.
Along with Campbell and Paille, fellow pending unrestricted free agents such as Matt Bartkowski, Adam McQuaid, Carl Soderberg, and backup goaltender Niklas Svedberg are still weighing their options.
But it’s Soderberg, the B’s third-line center with a highly successful 29 goals and 94 points in just 161 NHL games, that’ll garner the most interest from the Bruins (and the open market).
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows,” Soderberg said of his free agent status and what he expects to happen this summer. “I want to hear from Boston for sure first. That’s my first choice. If we can find a solution together this coming couple of months, that would be great.
“I’m comfortable. I like it here,” Soderberg added, “I think everyone on the team does. I would love to be here next year and have revenge.”
Soderberg also added that he’d like to play in the NHL for ‘a couple more years’, too.
But I’m not so sure that the 25-year-old Svedberg feels the same.
Svedberg, who joined the B’s organization three years back after a successful start to a career in the Swedish Elite League, is an unrestricted free agent (not a restricted free agent as widely reported), as he holds the status of a Group 6 free agent (a player 25 or older with three or more years of professional experience and less than 28 games played). And I don’t think Svedberg, who played in just seven games from January on, enjoyed riding the pine as much as he did this season.
“The number of games weren’t what I expected. I was hoping to play more, and I think I was playing good this year,” Svedberg said. “Certainly I was hoping for more games. The kind of position we were in, there was a lot of pressure here on the team, so Tuukka [Rask] played a lot of games and he also played very well. It’s the way it is. It was kind of frustrating. You want to play more, but that’s the way it is.
“Everything influences the decision,” Svedberg noted when asked if his lack of playing time will play a factor in a decision to re-sign with the Bruins and head elsewhere as a free agent this summer. “So we’ll kind of see in the coming weeks how to approach the next year. I’ll talk to my agent, everything, we just finished the season so I haven’t thought about it that much yet. So we’ll see.”
A mutual decision to part ways seems most likely for Svedberg and the B’s. The Boston coaching staff clearly didn’t trust Svedberg when it mattered most (as if a .918 save percentage is worth banishment to the end of the bench), while No. 72 clearly felt that he was deserving of the chance.
The elephant in the Boston room comes back to the offseason and any changes that the front office is considering making to either improve to re-tool the club. And the club’s captain of nine years,
Zdeno Chara, had some thoughts on that process, too.
“You have teams that go through, if you want to call it, rebuilding process. They make big, major changes. Then other teams are trying to do slow, slowly kind of replacing pieces and players,” the 6-foot-9 Chara said. “But that’s again, something that’s up to the management. But me as a player that has been in this organization for a good period of time, I know that we’re going to be better. I know that it’s something that we’ll realize it’s got to be much better next season. This is a team that has obviously high expectations. No matter how we’re going to do it in the offseason, as far as you call it, changing personnel or whatever’s going to happen, we’ve got to do our job on the ice.
“Nothing is guaranteed. That’s something that we all have to again go back to and start fresh next season,” Chara continued. “Just because somebody’s speaking you to be the team that could be competing for the Stanley Cup or the team that previously won something – nothing is guaranteed. Everybody’s starting from the same and that’s for sure, number one step we have to take.”
But it’s the wait for that first step that’ll feel like years for a Hub that’s without playoff hockey in their city for the first time since 2007, Chara’s first year with the Black and Gold.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
Join the Discussion:
»