Kalman: Don Sweeney Backs Claude Julien To Make Adjustments
WILMINGTON (CBS) – Bruins coach Claude Julien is coming back, and he's not going to blow up the foundation he's built to make the Bruins a perennial contender.
Julien spoke Wednesday at the Ristuccia Arena practice facility for the first time since the Bruins shook up their front office by firing general manager Peter Chiarelli and promoting Don Sweeney from assistant general manager to Chiarelli's vacated position.
Sweeney, who took a couple weeks to announce he was keeping Julien and his staff, emphasized at his introductory press conference a need to improve the Bruins' transition game and be more of a threat on the attack in order to resuscitate an offense that dropped from third to 22nd in the NHL in goals scored from 2013-14 to 2014-15.
The Bruins' inept offense garnered most of the blame for them failing to make the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in Julien's eight seasons as coach. Regardless of how each season ended, Julien and his staff met up in the aftermath to assess ways to make the Bruins better. Julien ignored the uncertainty of his status and conducted the same evaluation of the Bruins when this season ended, and as it turned out the coach's results matched those of the new GM.
"[The philosophies] meshed right away because you know when you talk philosophical approaches, every year so far and it will continue to be that way, we make adjustments in our game. The game evolves, the rules change. Again, the personnel of your team changes," Julien said. "So you make adjustments accordingly and ironically enough, two days after the season was done the coaching staff, we met, we'd already made some adjustments that we felt would probably be something that we'd like to see in our game. And Don happened to come in and we talked about those things. So we said 'well we've already done the work on that.' So it just goes to show that we were seeing the same things and we were pretty well on the same page."
Julien admitted he learned he was going to be back a little bit before Sweeney announced his decision about the coaching staff last Friday. In hindsight, the odds were always in Julien's favor, especially after the Bruins stayed in-house for Chiarelli's replacement.
First off, Julien showed loyalty to the Bruins by not seeking another job while in limbo. Second, the Bruins could've fired Julien at the same time as Chiarelli and earned some compensation from the next team to hire him. Had Julien found work elsewhere, the Bruins would've been off the hook for most of the contract extension they gave him last fall. But there were strong desires by both sides to stick together.
When Sweeney took over, he expressed his respect for Julien's coaching. Sweeney wasn't ready to commit to Julien until a thorough examination of the entire organization was completed. Although Sweeney's declarations about needing to punch up the offense and cause more "anxiety" for opponents at first sounded like an insult to Julien's system, in retrospect Sweeney was just answering a question about how he wanted to improve the team.
As Julien explained: "You know this thing again, the transition stuff and so on and so forth that they brought up are just things that because they're coming into a new job they're answering questions to you guys. Peter had been here for so long he didn't feel the need to go to you guys and tell you what we needed to do, we just did it. We made those adjustments every year."
So if Chiarelli had stayed, the adjustments would've been made. This isn't just lip service by Julien. The proof is in how the Bruins have slightly gotten more aggressive over the years, allowing the defensemen to pinch and join the attack more and allowing skaters that can carry the puck to do so when possible.
Chiarelli's sin wasn't making the Bruins play conservative hockey. He was fired because of his mismanagement of the salary cap and his failure to communicate with president Cam Neely. Neither of those failures could have or should have landed on Julien.
Sweeney hinted at his decision to keep Julien when the GM said at that same introductory press briefing that the Bruins weren't going to abandon their structure in their own end. It doesn't take a hockey genius to know that something is right when a team ranks in the top 10 in goals against seven straight seasons. Over those seven seasons, the Bruins have ranked in the top 10 in scoring four times. Personnel ability, injuries and a little bit of luck cause the fluctuations on offense, while the defense remains strong because of structure that rarely slumps and personnel that thrives within the system.
That's something that Sweeney knows and Neely has come to understand. It's public record that five years ago Neely was disgusted with the way the Bruins were playing. Organizational meetings and systemic alterations paid off in a Stanley Cup championship and a second trip to the Stanley Cup finals two seasons later. Now there are more alterations to be made and Julien will be implementing them because although Neely might have been tempted to drop the axe on Julien over the past several years, he's never done it. And now he's allowed Sweeney to keep Julien at the outset of this new era.
Julien's confident he has the backing of everyone in management, including Neely.
"I think it's foolish to think that a president is just hovering over a coach's head waiting for him to fire him," Julien said. "Because he's had the power I guess to do that and he didn't. So I think right there it's got to tell you something. So it's not an issue for me and I think again those things come out in different ways and those are things that you live with in this kind of business. There's a lot of speculations but there's no concrete evidence."
While Julien wasn't pursuing other jobs, Sweeney didn't talk to other coaches once he got his promotion. The Sweeney-Julien marriage was nearly inevitable.
It's not a marriage of convenience but one based on a track record that's nearly unmatched in Bruins history and one that should be given a sufficient amount of time to find it's groove.
Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.
