Bottoms up
If you could package hope, wrap it up, and set it beneath whatever form of evergreen might inhabit your home these days, only to open it up to fruition some time later, the possibilities would be endless.
Hope for a better economy.
Hope for a loved one.
Hope that “Lost” doesn’t jump the shark.
Bruins fans, well, you can’t blame them for exploding with hope this season. Claude Julien’s Boys of Winter continue to sit atop the Eastern Conference standings, threatening to pull away from the pack already in the Northeast Division, where they lead Les Canadiens by nine points. Is it a coincidence that without current B’s boss Peter Chiarelli on their side, Ottawa has fallen apart while the Bruins continue a climb they seemingly announced last spring?
However, I suppose some backhanded semblance of credit is due former GM Mike O’Connell, who blundered his way through his final season here, desperately grasping at straws, praying that something would come up roses. It’s been three years now since O’Connell decided the best way to save his job was to trade his best player in the hopes that…well, I really don’t know.
Joe Thornton, an NHL star, in the minds of many never really fulfilled his potential in Boston, where he was apparently expected to reinvent the game. He went on to win the Hart Trophy with San Jose later that season, while the Bruins finished with 74 points, dead-last in the Northeast.
Only Marco Sturm – sidelined for the past month with a neck injury – remains of the pieces Boston got in return. Wayne Primeau has four points for Calgary. Brad Stuart is a minus-5 for Detroit. Thornton has eight goals, 27 assists for the first-place Sharks, whose 52 points trump any other team in the NHL.
It was, safe to say, one of the worst deals in this town’s storied history of questionable moves.
But give O’Connell this: He made the Bruins such a downright, pathetic franchise that cleaning house was the only logical step to take.
In came Chiarelli. Out went (ugh) Mike Sullivan. In came the Dave Lewis mustache experiment. The Bruins inked Marc Savard and Zdeno Chara to free agent deals. The team still stunk, and Lewis had all the emotion of a blade of grass. Out went the ‘stache.
In came Julien, and with him a preaching of stifling hockey defense that doesn’t overly rely on the trap. The Bruins have allowed only 63 goals on the season thus far, which speaks not only to the masterful duo of Tim Thomas and Manny Fernandez between the pipes, but sparkling blueliners including Chara, Andrew Ference, and Shane Hnidy.
The offense has been somewhat of a surprise, if only because nobody could have expected Phil Kessel to mature overnight. Boston is third in the league in scoring, only trailing the Chicago Blackhawks and those first-place Sharks.
Now, of course it’s all a wee bit early to start planning a June Garden party with San Jose (at least for the hockey team the building inhabits; go ahead and make your Celtics plans), particularly considering the recent playoff futility of these two franchises. And it’s not like wining the conference stamps any sort of automatic ticket to Lord Stanley’s Finals either. Not since 2001 have both winners of the East (New Jersey) and West (Colorado) met for the right to raise the Cup.
You might remember that one. We celebrated it here for Raymond Bourque, in probably the lowest point Boston had succumbed to until the city started racking up titles. I’m surprised we didn’t have a Diamondbacks parade a few months later for ending the Yankee dynasty.
It would indeed be the ultimate showdown for the Bruins, facing off against the team that now employs their former star, the one who was supposed to lead Boston to similar sorts of glory. Talk about coming full-circle, facing off against Thornton would scream and shout how far the Bruins have come since the low point of that trade. From rock-bottom, to the top of the Boston sports landscape, once again, partly because their former general manager was an incompetent fool.
Chiarelli deserves much of the praise for constructing this team, but let’s give O’Connell his due for screwing things up so badly that change was evident.
So, while you’re bottling your hope, poised to uncork it come the spring, raise a toast to ineptitude of the past. For without it, these Bruins may never have materialized.
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