Kalman: Flawed Bruins Left To Hope For Better 2015
BOSTON (CBS) -- Well, at least the Bruins aren't still bragging about winning the Presidents' Trophy in 2013-14.
"It wasn't … I'll start off … It wasn't a good 2014," Bruins forward Milan Lucic said after the Bruins responded to his return to the lineup by sleepwalking through half a game and losing 4-3 to Toronto in a shootout at TD Garden on Wednesday.
"I'm happy it's over," Lucic continued. "I'm looking forward to 2015, so hopefully we can turn things around. Like I said, not much good things happened in 2014 for myself and for the team and just looking forward to 2015 and turning things around and hopefully it'll be better than this year."
This is where the Bruins stand as the calendar flips from 2014 to 2015. It's all about hope. Hope that they can figure out why after having the best record in the NHL last year they can't string more than a win or two together. Hope that their highest-paid forwards will start scoring at a higher pace than some of the league's middling defensemen. Hope that Zdeno Chara and Dennis Seidenberg are able to find their 2011 legs and Dougie Hamilton and Torey Krug can mature by three years in the next three months.
And it seems like the Bruins are banking a lot of their hope on their old ability to "flip the switch." General manager Peter Chiarelli once nearly lost his last hair in response to a question about the 2013 team doing just that. But there's nothing else to call it. When the Bruins are at their most desperate, when their backs are against the wall or they feel like their jobs or future together are at risk, that's when they mostly play their best. We saw that in Game 7 in 2013 against Toronto and we saw it this past Monday when the Detroit Red Wings landed at the Garden.
Of course, the Bruins got a lesson in waiting for the switch to flip when they came out flat for Game 7 last season. The result was a second-round ouster against the Montreal Canadiens. Everything's gone downhill from there, both in terms of personnel assessment and performance on the ice. The Bruins are a .500 hockey team when you combine the last two columns (which both represent losses) of their 19-15-4 record. They're outside of the playoff picture on Jan. 1. In a matter of months they've gone from talking about the Stanley Cup to talking about a measly playoff spot, which would mean a first-round matchup with Pittsburgh or Tampa Bay or Montreal. That's not usually the way a Cup run – which is what the Bruins promise every year – starts.
All the Bruins' hopes might be replaced by the wish for a trade – something that'll shake up the current roster. Clearly just the threat that someone will be moved out hasn't worked to get the Bruins going. Some of that lack of urgency is because so many of the Bruins' underperformers are protected by no-trade clauses. It might also be because by now everyone realizes how difficult it is to swing a meaningful trade during the regular season in the salary-cap era.
Lucic doesn't believe there's any hoping or waiting when it comes to a trade right now.
"I hope that guys aren't," he said. "I hope that we're not waiting around for some savior to come in and help this team be the team that it should be because it hasn't happened in the past. The core group is still here, so we still have the ability to be the team that we were in the past, so we can't wait for whether the GM is going to make a move or not. He's done a terrific job getting the right guys in this room at the right time and, you know, I think we just have to, as players, we just have to start trusting and believing in each other and the group that we have that we can get that winning streak together."
Unfortunately, Lucic's public opinion of his "terrific" general manager is a tad off, or the Bruins wouldn't be in their current predicament. Chiarelli didn't have the right makeup last season when the Bruins faced a Montreal team they knew they were going to run into and weren't able to slow down the Canadiens. Although Loui Eriksson has started to play the way Boston knew he could, we don't know if he'll be able to keep it up. Chiarelli's trade of Tyler Seguin continues to loom as a franchise-altering trade from which the Bruins might not recover for years.
Despite talk about remaking his fourth line, Chiarelli stuck with two-thirds of that group and they've rewarded him with some of the worst statistical performances imaginable. All the "prospects" Chiarelli gave a shot to win a job in training camp failed. You can blame the players for 90 percent of that. After that the Bruins' brass is responsible for not having a feel for how those players were preparing and how ready they'd be when they got to training camp. There's still time for things to turn around, but is anyone expecting Ryan Spooner or Alexander Khokhlachev to have any impact on the 2014-15 Bruins? Well, those guys were being counted on just a couple months ago.
The Bruins can hope for consistency and a turnaround all they want. If they find a way to work together as an 18-man unit for more than a couple of nights in a row, they might have enough firepower to squeak into the playoffs. But the Cup remains a long shot. To be elite again, the Bruins are going to need outside help. They've needed it since the salary cap situation forced the Bruins to part with the likes of Jarome Iginla and Johnny Boychuk.
Chiarelli hasn't done the job, and as the weeks have passed the mediocrity has increased. The Bruins have been left to try to salvage a few home postseason dates just to line ownership's coffers. A Cup run has become more of a "cross your fingers" endeavor and as the Bruins grow more desperate it's going to be more difficult to trade for anything of consequence. Other teams and general managers know when they have the leverage. Chiarelli has none.
The Bruins have to hope that through his failed player evaluations and unexplainable patience, Chiarelli didn't ruin 2015 before 2014 even ended.
Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.
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