Lacking a clear identity, the Boston Bruins are a mess
Globe Staff Photo/Jim Davis
COMMENTARY
Here’s the cold reality for the Boston Bruins exactly one week before “American Thanksgiving,’’ that benchmark point of the NHL season that team president Cam Neely has often used as the litmus test for the league: Heading into Thursday night’s game against the Minnesota Wild, the Bruins, with 17 points, are closer to last place in the Eastern Conference than they are to one of the two wild card spots.
Exactly one year ago, it was a fifth-place team, only five points off the pace of the conference-leading Montreal Canadiens. That was before the wheels came off and the Bruins careened into a mid-life crisis, missing the playoffs, firing their general manager, and re-tooling themselves into something that might become a serviceable product, but has yet to materialize into something worth anyone getting the least bit of hope behind.
The head coach included, it seems.
“I was excited about the potential,’’ Claude Julien said Tuesday following his team’s 5-4 loss at the TD Garden, where they are now 2-6-1 on the year. “There’s reason to be excited about the potential, because we’ve seen it. But disappointed in the fact that you never know what you’re going to get, either from period to period or game to game. That’s the disappointing part right now.’’
Not that we should be surprised, but this is who the 2015-16 Boston Bruins are; a hastened concoction of philosophies that has no idea from which end of the ice the plan to rebuild is commencing. It’s all led to an 8-8-1 start to the season, a just-good-enough stretch of 17 games that has had its ups (the 5-3 win in Arizona last month was a harbinger of this team’s potential fight) and downs (see Seguin, Tyler, Nov. 3 in Boston).
But with the 10-4-3 Wild on tap at the Garden, the Bruins are currently mired in a 2-5 stretch this month, ripe with defensive breakdowns, poor goalie play (it’s OK to say it, members of the Church of Rask), and a crumbling penalty kill unit that has become the red carpet of the NHL. In fact, the Bruins and the Wild head into Thursday’s game with the two-worst penalty kills in the entire league.
Even the most vocal critics of Chris Kelly had to understand that the Bruins would be at even more of a disadvantage in shorthanded situations when they lost the two-way skill of the forward to a broken femur two weeks ago, but what might not have been as evident was the absence of Kelly’s leadership. We’re talking about “passengers’’ again (still?) when it comes to the Bruins, an in-house criticism of those on the roster not carrying their own weight.
“I think right now if we’re going to get out of this and we’re going to start putting a few wins together, we have to have everyone going every night and we can’t have any passengers at all,’’ Brad Marchand said Tuesday. “If we have one, that’s enough to cost us a game. And right now, we have way too many.’’
It’s not hard to determine where the Mason-Dixon line is in the Bruins’ dressing room, particularly when it comes to on-point criticism from veteran players following the lead of their head coach. Ryan Spooner found himself benched in even-ice situations during the third period on Tuesday. He, along with Brett Connolly, is a minus-3 on the season, despite being among the team leaders in goals scored. That sort of inconsistency has driven the frustration from Julien’s brow down to guys like Marchand and Patrice Bergeron, who have become more vociferous in their criticism of teammates of late.
Which is really all part of the problem to begin with. The front office doesn’t really know who it wants the Bruins to be, giving Julien a broken-down defensive corps, a sprinkling of Peter Chiarelli leftovers, and a new mantra touting speed and youth that hasn’t meshed well with the approach the Stanley Cup-winning coach has wrought over his time here in Boston. All the while, Neely and Don Sweeney insist that Julien isn’t on borrowed time, even though it becomes more evident with each loss, each postgame-pointed comment, that the coach is really here merely because Chiarelli gave him an extension a year ago, and since the Jacobs family is paying him anyway…
“I don’t think we’ve got the focus or commitment of the whole group,’’ Julien said. “I’m not saying anything that nobody knows here. I think it’s pretty obvious.’’
It’s obvious that the Bruins are a mess. It’s not so clear how to rectify that reality.
Thus, Boston is in hockey purgatory with an odd blend of appetites at the most pivotal assessment period of the season.
Contact Eric Wilbur at: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @GlobeEricWilbur
Photos: 36 images that will remind you how tough the ‘Big Bad Bruins’ were
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