Boston Bruins: Scratching Tyler Seguin a Fitting, Necessary Punishment

Tuesday was supposed to be the night Tyler Seguin suited up for his 100th regular-season NHL game as his Boston Bruins visited a team called the Winnipeg Jets for the first time since he was three years of age going on four.

Unfortunately for his sake, Seguin, who is now 19 going on 20, apparently proved a tad less mature off the ice than he has been on it amidst his sophomore surge. The youngest member of Boston’s roster and the most fruitful producer on the Bruins’ stat sheet missed a team function earlier in the day.

In turn, head coach Claude Julien rightly chose to delete him from Tuesday night’s lineup. Seguin’s century milestone will have to wait at least 48 hours, and the Bruins will have to shoot for back-to-back wins one celestial scorer down. And Seguin has nobody to blame but himself.

Hey, this is the textbook team sport. If you openly relinquish your team commitment for even a moment, you and your team must pay an evenhanded fee.

To be sure, this is nowhere close to a black eye on Seguin’s image. It is more like a small, yet not-so-invisible blackhead pimple.

That said, by failing to evoke enough willpower to step out of the comfort zone that was his hotel room bed, he negligently misplaced his professionalism, which cannot happen for much more than a millisecond in the show.

By getting off to a point-per-game start this season right after winning a Stanley Cup as a rookie, Seguin has already demonstrated a selfless work ethic. But it seems he still must learn to demonstrate that on a perpetual basis.

Tellingly enough, this happened on the tail end of a case of back-to-back road games, one apiece set in a different city, a different time zone and a different country.

On Monday night, Seguin had splashed a bit of a production drought with a power-play goal that offered Boston an extra dose of insurance en route to a 3-1 triumph in Pittsburgh. Soon thereafter, he joined all of his black and gold elders in a hasty flight to Winnipeg, where they were to swing back into action roughly 23 hours after the horn at Consol Energy Center.

Perhaps, given the travel, the quick turnaround and the ostensibly lighter-weight adversary on deck after conquering the top-seeded team in the Eastern Conference, Seguin subconsciously thought this was the best time to decelerate.

Except, of course, there is no ideal time to decelerate during the season. One can trust that this  violation was not committed with malice or carelessness aforethought. But at the same time, Seguin was still overcome with a combination of fatigue and the misguided notion of “easy games” and cashing in reward points for an off-day/night.

This author saw plenty of this as a student/journalist covering the sports scene at Providence College, and one example comes to memory right away. One night, after the perennially sturdy women’s hockey team all but voluntarily ended its own seven-game winning streak with a 2-1 loss to a floundering Vermont team, Friars head coach Bob Deraney did his best to repress his disgust as he said, “Young people want it easy.”

He also speculated that “It’s a very long season and I think they’re looking to catch their breath, and you can’t catch your breath.”

To that point, since none of the other Bruins tried to steal extra sleep early Tuesday morning, odds are they were not going to voluntarily snap their own 15-game point-getting streak by submitting to a so-so Jets team.

Since it was Seguin acting alone and because he was implicitly banking on getting into better game shape at the expense of appearing at a team meeting, Julien needed to let his top gun defeat his own purpose.

That extra sleep was unauthorized and therefore needed to be put to waste. The only way to ensure that was to give Seguin a full day off when he honestly wanted no more and no less than the morning off. At this level, it’s one of those tough all-or-nothing options.

Hours in advance of Tuesday night’s opening draw, Julien himself addressed the urgent need to ward off “lazy habits” and the fact that the quick dart from Pittsburgh to Winnipeg, in and of itself, posed “a big test.”

Seguin, who with a Joe Schmo athletic skill set would probably be a sophomore in college right now, cheated on that test. But because he faced suitable consequences, it is a safe bet he will grow and learn from his own ill-advised decision.

It could be worse. This could have been a troika of seasoned, World Series-winning pitchers savoring unhealthy meals behind the scenes during game action and facing no discipline whatsoever.

Seguin is not even a millionaire yet. Better that he learns that being a good kid and a good player does not entitle you to a single slack day now rather than before hitting a seven-figure salary and letting that conflict with his commitment.