What Went Wrong for the Boston Bruins in Disappointing 2014-15 Season?

Mike Milbury, who still bleeds black and gold whether he'll admit it or not, summed up the plight of the Boston Bruins for the NBC Sports Network Saturday night. The Bruins, as hockey watchers know, lost in a shootout to the Tampa Bay Lightning and, with the Pittsburgh Penguins clinching a spot just minutes before anyway, failed to qualify for the postseason for the first time since 2005-06. 

"We learned that the Bruins are going to have to change, whether that means fresh with a new general manager or..."

(Let me cut off Mad Mike here for a second. After watching him for years, the first person he usually goes after when ripping a team is the GM. Freud would no doubt have a field day with this, as Milbury's resume during his time as a GM was—shall we put it kindly—terribly, brutally awful.)

Still, Milbury's take is valuable, so let's hear more, as he said to NBC:

"Or, a new coach. That remains to be seen." (It'll probably be a total housecleaning, with Cam Neely assuming Chiarelli's throne.) 

"One thing is certain: They have to address their drafting. It hasn't been very good (so, Dougie Hamilton in the first round a couple years ago was a total bust?). Their salary cap has been mismanaged."

Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. Mad Mike is right about that. The Bruins, under Chiarelli, made some bad decisions when parceling out the money to whom they thought best to earn it going forward with a spoked-B on the crest.

Let's start with the trade of Johnny Boychuk right before the season.

Winslow Townson/Associated Press

Here was a guy who came from nothing (cast out of Colorado early the last decade) who reinvented himself as a tough, stay-at-home D-man with a Wicked Big Slappah from the point. He was a true leader in the Boston dressing room, and yes I know that the idealization of the "locker room guy" in hockey is very often over-romanticized by the people of the game.

As former Calgary and Tampa Bay coach and Flyers player Terry Crisp once told me, and I'm paraphrasing here, "If a guy can't do it on the pond, he won't be heard in the room."

Exactly. Now, was Boychuk the real leader of the Bruins? No, that man was then, and still is now, the captain—Zdeno Chara. But Chara was banged up too much this year to be the Big Zed, forgetting about the fact that he's pretty old and Father Time always wins.

Here's what usually happens to a team when the character guys are shipped out by management, because they think character is an easier thing to replace than talent: the teams usually suffer in the short term, though they may prosper in the long term. In the worst-case scenario, it's both.

We don't know yet how the two second-round draft picks and a third from the Islanders for Boychuk will turn out. It could prove a savvy deal on behalf of Chiarelli. The problem for him is he probably won't be in the TD Garden Center suite to accept the kudos on the deal. He's likely to be broomed. 

Why do I predict this for Chiarelli? Because it wasn't just the Boychuk deal. A lot of diehard fans rued the moment he and, to be fair, Neely, sent Tyler Seguin packing for Dallas in a deal that brought back Loui Eriksson and Reilly Smith.

Smith was really good last year, mediocre this year. Eriksson has been just OK both years, and that was the problem with that deal. Seguin, despite his shortcomings as a defensive player, has been a top-10 scorer since the deal. He's a young guy who does nothing but score. Bruins management should have been smarter in realizing that, hey, OK, the kid overslept on occasion, but he's still a major talent on whom you can't just give up so quick. Eriksson and Smith are nice complementary guys. But Chiarelli had to get a real stud back for Seguin, and he didn't.

Cap-management problems? Yes. Jarome Iginla really wanted to stay in Boston after leading the team in goals last season. But the B's didn't have the cap space. So they let Iginla go, and all he did was lead the Avalanche in goals too. The Avs didn't make the playoffs with Iginla, but that's not the whole point. The fact is, Boston lacked a good shot from inside the dots all year, and Iginla could have filled the void enough to get this team back in the playoffs. 

Talk to some Bruins people, though, and they'll tell you privately the loss of Boychuk wound up being huge -- maybe even more than they realized at the time.

By the end, reports said this was a team somewhat in finger-pointing mode. Even coach Claude Julien got in on the act.

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

 “I don’t think we’ve had the same team [this season] that we’ve had in the past. You guys can talk about it, but the roster is not the same," Julien told reporters.

Shot fired right there, from Julien to Chiarelli. 

Look, this happens with most teams. You're good for a while, things get stale and/or age catches up to you and it's over. 

The Bruins won a Stanley Cup in 2011, after being down three games to two to what probably was a more talented Vancouver team. They followed that up with lots of fine hockey, including an Eastern Conference regular-season title last season. 

But time, complacency and bad decisions caught up with them this year. It happens in hockey. The good news is, it might only be a year before everything somehow turns all around again for them.

It  might be under different management, though.