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When it all came to a bitter end for the 2014-15 Boston Bruins in Tampa Bay on Saturday night, with their fate decided before their own game went final, it wasn’t hard to dish out the blame. You could point to almost every single player on the B’s roster and say, “Yeah, he should have given you more.” The general manager and coach are included in that decision to a degree, too, I believe. But if you were breaking down this year’s version of the Black and Gold, Boston’s first non-playoff hockey team since the 2006-07’s nightmare of a year under Dave Lewis, to a single phrase? It’s missed opportunities.
Within a second, you could make a list of games that haunted the Bruins. How about the October game where the Bruins surrendered a game-winning goal to Colorado’s
Danny Briere with just half a second left in the third period? Or when the Bruins dominated teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs (New Year’s Eve) and Buffalo Sabres (Mar. 17) for 65 minutes, but lost in the shootout both times? Or when the Black and Gold threw rookie goaltender
Malcolm Subban to the wolves of the first-place St. Louis Blues for his first career start rather than the Edmonton Oilers (like planned), and in essence decided that they’d rather not have the two points? These games alone took at least five points off the table for the B’s, and that’s just a few of the games you can recall off the top of your head.
(Frustratingly enough, it was a litany of ‘missed opportunities’ that most believed kept the Bruins from ousting the Montreal Canadiens in their seven-game second-round war last spring, too.)
In general, the shootout, like it or not, was this Bruins team’s Achilles’ heel. Finishing the year with just four wins in 14 shootouts, Boston shooters connected for goals in the ‘glorified skills competition’ just nine times on 60 attempts. That 15% success rate was the second-worst in the league, just .7% better than the Los Angeles Kings’ 5-for-35 mark (14.3%). To put that sort of futility into perspective, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the two seed in the Atlantic Division bracket, were the league’s worst playoff shootout club, connecting on 5-of-21 attempts (23.8%) in eight shootouts (three wins) this season. The Bruins would have needed to score another five shootout goals this year to have matched that percentage. That’s a couple of wins there, more than enough to punch a ticket to the postseason.
Individually, it was tough to find anything close to a ‘go-to’ lineup of shooters, too. While
Patrice Bergeron was the Bruins’ most efficient shooter in the shootout (3-for-12), the Black and Gold had nine skaters that finished the year with one goal or fewer (zero) in two or more attempts this year. Most of the time, these guys would find ways to skate within six feet of the goaltender and then hit glass.
Even if they’re not your forte, and even you think they’re gimmicky and not the best way to settle games, you have to find ways to earn that second point and the B’s just did not.
But the fall of the 2014-15 Bruins goes beyond their failures in the shootout. And the realization that they were far from the elite, Presidents’ Trophy winning squad from a year ago set in long before that.
It’s the easy answer, I’m aware, but their problems started before the season even began, really.
General manager
Peter Chiarelli took a huge risk on the one-year, bonus-laden contract for
Jarome Iginla that wreaked about $4.5 million in bonus overages the following season (this season) while Iginla left for Colorado, opting not to take another one-year cheat deal with the B’s. Hoping that Iginla would value a Cup over financial stability in his late-30s was an undeniable oversight from Chiarelli and the Bruins. And with about $15 to their name, the Bruins had absolutely no money to find a legitimate replacement on the free agent market to put in his spot on their first line. They could have found a replacement on the trade market at some point, but it seemed that a move like that would have required the Black and Gold to move a piece of their core out to make it all work from a financial standpoint, something they were not yet ready to commit to given the group’s success.
Instead, they opted for hail mary attempts with camp invites to
Simon Gagne and
Ville Leino. It took all of one preseason game for everyone in Boston to realize that the 31-year-old Leino could hardly skate before that idea was released from training camp. Although Gagne, who returned to the NHL after a one-year hiatus (Gagne worked as a hockey analyst on TV), was eventually signed to an NHL contract, he lasted just 23 games before leaving the team to be with his grieving family following the death of his father, scoring three goals while playing primarily on the fourth line.
If those moves didn’t speak to the cap woes and desperation of the Black and Gold, nothing would.
And when those reclamation projects failed to pan out, Julien was asked to make the undersized
Seth Griffith (in just his second year of professional hockey) and/or
Craig Cunningham (a scrappy energy forward that had fourth line written all over him) into top-six quality talents next to Krejci and Lucic. When that didn’t work, the 18-year-old David Pastrnak was brought into a picture, burning a valuable year of his entry-level contract off the Boston books.
The
Johnny Boychuk trade, although a necessity given the B’s need to get under the salary cap
and ice a complete roster before the start of the regular season, obviously hurt, too. It put the club back in the situation they were in at last year’s trade deadline. They were instantly back to requiring a top-four defenseman, particularly one that could complement
Dennis Seidenberg on their second pairing. And ultimately, shockingly (not really), one failed to fall in their laps. That left coach
Claude Julien with the task of making patchwork middle pairings that featured Adam McQuaid or Matt Bartkowski alongside Seidenberg somehow work too many nights to count.
Down a top-line winger and a top-four defender, the Bruins became an average team that hoped to make upgrades and/or rely on . And that was before they were dealt borderline deathblows with
Zdeno Chara’s severe knee injury (even when he came back, he was not operating close to 100%), and various injuries to
David Krejci,
Dougie Hamilton late, and so on.
Injuries happen to everybody, and there were a ton of teams that were worse off than the Bruins, so it’s not a legitimate excuse for the Black and Gold. But when you’re an
average team before the injuries, then you’re in even more trouble. And there you had the 2014-15 Boston Bruins.
But even so, the Bruins found ways to compete. Goaltender
Tuukka Rask was a bright spot for the club in spite of a franchise-record-tying 70 appearances in the crease, and kept the Bruins in countless games they had no business being in. They found a late-season spark with Providence callups
David Pastrnak and
Ryan Spooner. And a healthy
Loui Eriksson potted 22 goals and 47 points this season, all while logging third-line and second power play unit minutes.
It wasn’t all bad.
Still, there’s a natural sting that comes with the Bruins’ seven-year playoff streak coming to an end.
Is there any consolation to be found in the club finishing with the most points for a non-playoff club (96) in league history? Oh my God, absolutely not. If anything that makes those aforementioned losses all the more maddening, probably. But there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this for the Bruins.
First, they can no longer fight the change the game is going through.
It’s becoming quicker. And when you were frequently a step or two behind numerous goals in 2014-15, you could afford to gain some speed. And you’ll notice that it’s a lot of these young guys that are, well, quicker. So perhaps this is a two-headed monster they must surrender to, but if I could put this in bold print across the Garden, I would: The Bruins simply need to get quicker and they need to get younger (or embrace their youth and the mistakes they’ll make as they develop into NHL talents). Patience has always been the key in Boston, and I think it should remain that way, the Bruins will need to find a way to live with the mistakes that a Spooner, Pastrnak, or
Alex Khokhlachev will sometimes make in their own end ‘cause the rewards reaped at the other end will without question make it worth it.
The Bruins talked about this at their year-end press conference last spring, too. They talked about how their fourth line needed to make a slight transition from braun to skill. It didn’t. It somehow got older and slower. And with this becoming an issue for two straight seasons now, it’s on the Black and Gold front office to legitimately address this and no longer treat the league trend as some sort of a fluke.
Secondly, the Bruins need to figure out their identity. If you asked me to describe this team to you in terms of its on-ice makeup and personality? I’d tell you that they were a shapeless group without any real sort of tangible identity that made them unique from the other 14 clubs sitting at home today. There was no moment in 2014-15 that made you say, “OK, so that’s what these guys are.”
(Not in a necessarily positive light, anyways.)
Moving forward, do they want to remain a ‘heavy, hard to play against’ term with size, physicality and a grind it out around the net and in the corners mentality? Or would they like to begin their metamorphosis into a team predicated on speed, skill, and scoring off the rush?
A lot of this comes back to the front office and what moves they contemplate making this year. If they were to trade
Milan Lucic, who has one year at $6 million left on his current contract, then it’s fairly obvious that they would consider the days of the new era ‘Big Bad Bruins’ a thing of the past.
And third and perhaps most importantly, the Bruins need to understand these things happen.
When considering the changes outlined in my second point, you don’t want to say that your identity or that your system is a ‘problem’ just yet, especially when you’ve been a second-round (at least) fixture in this league in almost every single season since 2008. But there are tweaks to be made. And I want to put emphasis on the word ‘tweaks’, really. I don’t think that a full-on implosion of the Black and Gold is a good idea. Clearing out the coaching staff
and the front office is a move that could set you back two to three years (at least) if it’s not done properly and with the best intentions of the organization considered at great length. (And that’s a whole lot worse than failing to make the playoffs by just two points in one of eight otherwise highly successful seasons if you ask me.)
Do I think that the Bruins were considerably disappointing this season? No doubt. At the same time, however, there were times where I said, “Yeah, if player-x, line-y, or goalie-x gets into a groove here, this team could probably win the Eastern Conference.” Heck, I still feel that way even with the B’s finishing the year on the outside looking in. This is still a pretty solid hockey club. One off year should not define this group or serve as the match that sets off the dynamite to blow it all up. I still believe that Julien, while sometimes loyal to a fault, is a top-tier coach in this league. And I think guys like Chara, Eriksson,
Brad Marchand and even
Dennis Seidenberg -- names that you’ve heard as possible trade chips for a core-changing trade in the Hub -- can still be legitimate building blocks for a Stanley Cup contender in Boston if they’re given a stronger supporting cast.
In essence, you can’t just change for the sake of change.
There absolutely has to be a goal in mind with this franchise’s makeup.
Without it, you’re gonna be even more lost than you felt for 82 games, and just 82 games, this season.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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