Peter Chiarelli Had a Successful Bruins Run, But He Had to Go

The moment of silence came at 2:49 Wednesday afternoon, but only after an avalanche of noise wrapped up the morning.

From Fall River: Aaron Hernandez, guilty of murder in the first degree.

From Causeway Street: Peter Chiarelli, relieved of his duties as Bruins general manager.

It’s somewhat stunning that Ted Wells’ crew didn’t hastily wrap up its Deflategate findings in order to join in on a news dump normally reserved for Friday afternoon.

Not that there’s any credence to the Bruins finding the most convenient time to announce that they had fired their GM of nine years, but the move went under the radar like news on Christmas morning, which this probably felt like for a certain segment of Bruins fans anyway.

“This was a process, and it was iterative,” Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs said at Wednesday afternoon’s press conference to discuss the firing. “We had an ongoing dialogue and we finally made a decision regarding Peter on Tuesday.”

A day later marked the first annual “One Boston Day,” “a celebration of the resiliency, generosity, and strength of the people that make Boston the great city it is,” including a city-wide reflection for the victims at the time the first of the two bombs went off along Boylston Street.

It’s been two years since the Boston Marathon attacks. Two years since Hernandez was known as nothing more than a talented pass-catching tight end for the New England Patriots. Two years since the Boston Bruins began a playoff run that would eventually lead them back to their second Stanley Cup final in three seasons.

But there was little Bruins resiliency in 2015, in large part thanks to an incomplete roster that Chiarelli failed to ever stabilize, made worse by his mishandling of the NHL salary cap that the Bruins may have to pay for in the years following his dismissal. This is why those hoping that the Bruins stayed status quo this week were living in a fantasy land filled with glowing pucks and dancing ice queens. This wasn’t a bad year for a good team. It was a bad year for a team on a precipitous decline.

“We’ve got still a good core of good players who have good character,” Bruins president Cam Neely said. “To a man, most of them admitted that they had an off-year this year. We think that this group is still good enough to help us compete for championships. The difficult thing is where we are up against the cap and that’s going to be something that we’re going to have to manage.”

Good luck with that.

Since the Bruins hoisted the Stanley Cup in 2011 (an accomplishment that took a trio of Game 7’s to attain), Boston lost to the Washington Capitals in seven games in 2012. It miraculously got past the Toronto Maple Leafs in seven games in 2013, sparking an inspired trip past the Rangers and Penguins onto the Blackhawks. The Bruins beat the Detroit Red Wings in the first round last year, then predictably gagged against the Montreal Canadiens. In seven, of course.

If you’re looking for results, then hell, raises for everyone. But beyond the scores for Chiarelli was a host of issues that eventually came back to bite him. His drafting was atrocious at worst, suspect at best, taking busts like Zach Hamill (eighth overall), Joe Colborne (16th overall), and, most infamously, Jordan Caron (25th overall) in addition to proven top-level guys like Dougie Hamilton and…oh, right, Tyler Seguin.

Seguin, taken No. 2 overall in 2010, might turn out to forever be Newman to Chiarelli’s Seinfeld, a lingering presence that will always be there to nag at him like a festering loop of “Blurred Lines.” Chiarelli will get work elsewhere. He’s too good of a GM. But let’s just say that if it’s the Dallas Stars that come calling, Chiarelli probably won’t take the call.

The behind-the-scenes whispers as to why the Bruins had to trade a 23-year-old who has scored 37 goals in each of his first two seasons with the Stars probably won’t grow any louder with Chiarelli’s dismissal, even if they might shed some light on why Sequin simply wasn’t going to last in Boston. That’s not the front office’s fault. But the return that Chiarelli received for Sequin (Loui Eriksson, Reilly Smith, Joe Morrow, and Matt Fraser) is, in non-hockey terms, the equivalent of being sold the beanstalk. What magical land Chiarelli thought he might discover by planting Smith and Eriksson on this team in place of the dynamic Sequin is beyond anyone’s comprehension.

If that didn’t already seal his fate, fast-forward to last summer, when Chiarelli waved goodbye to free agent Jarome Iginla, whom he couldn’t sign thanks to the salary cap restrictions he had imposed upon the team, and Johnny Boychuk, a top-four defenseman he didn’t have to trade for another five months. The return on the pair? Two second-round draft picks.

Chiarelli helped the Bruins win a Stanley Cup, but you’re only fooling yourself if you don’t think it was very clear that it was time for him to go.

“Clearly, Peter has had a lot of success, so it wasn’t a decision that we took lightly,” Neely said.

But it also seemed like a decision a long time coming, particularly as Neely admitted on Wednesday that it was during the season that the team encouraged Chiarelli not to approach the NHL trading deadline as if he were attempting to fix the sinking ship he had created. In other words, don’t try to save your behind at this point.

“At some point during the year, as we approached the trading deadline, I had a conversation with Peter to make sure we were protecting assets as we could,” Neely said. “Believe me, Peter was very professional and he was going to do everything he could to do to help improve our club during the season, It was more of a — for me — trading assets for rentals, which he understood.”

In other words, “Hey, Pete, that Ryan Spooner for Chris Stewart deal you had on the table? Don’t even think about it.”

Of course, this all leaves Bruins head coach Claude Julien writhing in limbo as the team awaits and sees if the next GM wants a new coach, or — nudge, nudge — would maybe like to try and stick with the guy the franchise handed a new three-year contract extension last fall. The Jacobs family will be paying the guy anyway, you know.

“We really believe once we go through the exhaustive search to find the next general manager, that we will leave it up to that GM to decide what he wants to do with our coaching staff,” Neely said. “Claude certainly understood that.”

Sure, but for how long? Especially as he sits and waits, watching other vacant coaching slot get filled around the league?

The franchise isn’t burning down everything it’s built over the past, successful decade, but it is snuffing out the embers before they turned into something significantly harder to turn away from. In that regard, Chiarelli had to go.

“It was really about how do we improve our club moving forward,” Jacobs said. “It’s a task and, frankly, an audit that we take every year after the season is over. The season happened to end a lot earlier than many for us. We’ve been very fortunate in that regard. I think Peter had a very good tenure here when you think about one, the trips to the playoffs, and two, the success in the playoffs that he’s had. But It became time, we believed to be, to separate and move forward.”