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After a decade on the job, the Boston Bruins have relieved head coach Claude Julien of his duties and will be replaced by Bruce (Butch) Cassidy on an interim basis for the rest of the season.
It
should be the least surprising headline you’ll read this season, to be honest.
But somehow, in true Bruins fashion, the Black and Gold found a way to make this shocking, as the club decided to make this firing official just hours before a Super Bowl victory parade was to be held in Boston. Oh, and the press conference to talk about it? Yeah, that was scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Also known as right when the Patriots’ parade was set to begin. In a day of snow in the Hub, the Bruins grabbed a broom instead of a shovel and began to frantically sweep what they could under their rugs.
Julien, a coach that brought a Stanley Cup back to Boston and still stands as the franchise’s all-time winningest coach, was done dirty by B’s general manager Don Sweeney. It was a bad look. Period.
“I did not necessarily pick this day to take away from the great accomplishment by the New England Patriots. But, I had taken a few days to assess where we were at and came to my decision to make a change in regards to Claude [Julien],” Sweeney, in his second year on the job, said at Warrior Ice Arena. “First of all, I want to thank Claude. I want to acknowledge the level of success that he has achieved as the coach of the Boston Bruins and acknowledge he is a great coach, a tremendous person, and he’s meant a lot to our organization. We’re going to wish him nothing but the greatest level of success that he can achieve. He’ll be a great coach with another organization in a short time, I’m quite positive of that. Very, very difficult morning for me, personally, delivering that news.
“We had a conversation with Claude, who was, as he always is and as you guys would know, was an absolute, true pro about it this morning, and had a talk that you don’t know how it’s necessarily going to go, what the reaction is going to be. But, he was, as I described, a tremendous pro and I’ve got a tremendous level of respect for Claude as a person, working with him over the past couple of years. But, had come to a conclusion that, in moving this group forward with an eye towards the plan that we had put in place, that I wasn’t ready to commit on a longer-term basis with Claude.”
OK, but hold on, why today?
“We had a couple days off and we have two days of practice here before we go into a few games. And then we have a real opportunity to sort of step back from the emotional piece of this and allow the players to get away and vacate mentally and physically,” Sweeney admitted when pressed as to why it’s today versus any other day. “I felt there was an opportunity today and tomorrow to get their feet in the ground for a practice environment, which we haven’t had. We had played 50 games in 102 days or so, and I’m sure the schedule has been very challenging in that regard. I just felt that there was an opportunity now, as I was contemplating the decision, the impact of the decision. Again, I apologize that it fell on a day where, obviously, New England is incredibly excited. But, I didn’t make the schedule in terms of where these days would exist from a practice standpoint.”
Alright, I’m sorry -- but still, why today? Why not during the break of the All-Star break? Or during next week’s bye week, if you’re looking for the players to get that mental breather?
“I have support of the ownership. Mr. Jacobs and Charlie [Jacobs] and Cam [Neely], to make the decisions that I think are important in moving forward. Matt [Chmura] can attest to the fact that I’m always thinking about optics or whatever, but I’m not going to make a decision just based on that,” continued Sweeney. “I’m very respectful and I acknowledged that to begin with – the achievement that they had, I’m not trying to take away in any way, shape, or form, or deflect or try to mute, the impact of the decision that I made this morning in moving forward. As I said, the schedule represents an opportunity to have a couple days of practice. I thought that was vitally important.”
As I said, this news is anything but shocking. Julien was always going to be a goner under Sweeney. There was no possible way that the breakup was going to be an amicable one, or that Julien would not end up being the fall guy much like Chiarelli was in 2015 and how Chiarelli’s cap management was in 2016. Hell, the B’s PR department took the fall for the timing of Sweeney’s press conference today.
“The PR department had explained that, once you make a decision in that regard, you need to stand up in front of people and acknowledge the reasons behind it, and move on from there,” Sweeney said.
What. A. Mess. But an expected one nevertheless.
When it came to Julien’s fate, the silence from the B’s front office last month during the height of the Julien Is Getting Fired media frenzy told you everything you needed to know. They instead let Julien go to bat for himself, and the players do their bidding for them. Patrice Bergeron said he believed Julien’s message was still getting through to the team. Zdeno Chara said the room was not lost. An irritated and honest Brad Marchand said that he felt that the entire story was media-driven. Sweeney and team president Cam Neely let all of that happen while their silence echoed throughout the city.
Why publicly defend the guy you’re going to can? What’s the point?
“It was really a communication level that I could not get past – the fact that I wasn’t committed in my own mind to sort of go beyond where we are right now with Claude,” Sweeney said. “Where we are as an organization, I don’t know if those two things lined up, but the level of success he’s had, the way we were playing, that the roster wasn’t built and necessarily complete or a finished product – are we an elite team? No, we’re a very competitive team, which we were last year, and what I described. We have areas and gaps within our game that exist. Whether that’s strictly personnel related, or whether or not those are some tweaks that we need to make or continue to make, that’s what’s going to unfold here. I think the opportunity for Bruce, who I’ve had a working relationship with, to come in and sort of evaluate his job and where our staff is as well as our personnel is important. It’s an important period of time that we can continue to allow to unfold as opposed to waiting until the season’s end and just seeing if we hadn’t done anything, whether or not that would have worked.”
That communication level never made its way to the media, which allowed the Julien situation to become a massive distraction for this team, which was finally acknowledge as such on Tuesday.
“For sure,” an emotional Marchand said when asked if the rumors became a distraction for the team that just
looked tight throughout January. “Any time you have that noise it can bring unwanted pressure. We were kind of trying to shut that down so we just had to worry about playing.”
Now they’ll have to worry about playing for a new coach (something many of these players have not done, not at this level, anyways), and that coach will have to worry about fixing what’s gone wrong and quickly before the Bruins fall off the cliff and down to their third straight postseason miss.
“We’re going to find out soon enough, but I think that the team is not that far away from winning games. We’ve pointed out lately we’ve, there was a quote out there, we’ve found ways to lose instead of win. That means you’re generally close, so we’ve got to flip the switch on a few of those plays throughout the course of the game that go in our favor,” Cassidy said of what he wants to bring to the team for the final 27 games of the season. “Whether that’s defending a little better, managing the puck a little better, getting a save at a key time, finishing at a key time. How we do that, we’re not going to reinvent the wheel system-wise. I thought there’s a lot of good things in place.”
Ty Anderson is the Boston Bruins beat writer for WEEI.com, and has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010. He can be heard on the Saturday Skate program on 93.7 WEEI (Boston), can also be found in the New England Hockey Journal magazine, and has been part of the Boston Chapter of the PHWA since 2013. Contact him on Twitter or send him an email at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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