PHOTO BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Boston Bruins interim coach Bruce Cassidy watches his players during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Arizona Coyotes in Boston.
By STEVE KRAUSE
The Patriots are so hot you’ll burn your finger if you touch the logo. The Red Sox, simply because they’re the Red Sox, generate a fair amount of heat of their own. Perhaps not as much as the Patriots, but it’s there.
The Celtics are up-and-coming. They have a hot little guard in Isaiah Thomas who’s tons of fun to watch; at the moment they are pushing the Cleveland Cavaliers (who never thought that would happen) for the top seed in the Eastern Conference; and they have potentially a shot at the best college player in the country when the June draft rolls around.
At the moment, we’re fortunate in that three of the “Big Four” seem to be going in the right direction. It’s the fourth one that has everyone not just worried, but irritated beyond belief.
We’re talking, of course, about the Bruins.
If the other three teams are smartly dressed, and smartly drilled, soldiers on graduation day, the Bruins are the guys from “Stripes,” who roll out of bed and come to the party late. When they fired Claude Julien last month, they should have replaced him with Sgt. Hulka.
The Bruins got a nice bump last month after replacing Julien with Bruce Cassidy (first six times I saw that name I actually thought it was Butch), and they seemed as if they were going to bust through the annual March malaise that cost them the playoffs in the last two seasons. They were in good shape, walking tall, looking sharp … and scoring goals. At the time, their post-firing winning streak was a blessing because it took the curse off the cheap, shoddy way they handled the Julien situation.
It appeared as if Cassidy was ready to take the shackles off a lot of these kids and let them skate. The knock on Julien was that he preferred his veterans and didn’t deal with with kids and the growing pains they might have.
Though it’s not an unusual situation, I’m not sure how fair that was to Julien. He was under a mandate to produce playoff-ready teams with a roster that may not have been up to playoff standards. Now that the bloom is falling off the rose, and the Bruins have lost four straight games and seem to be repeating their own version of March Madness, this lack of talent is becoming more evident.
But here’s the rub. If the Bruins stay on their downward trajectory, the person who gets hurt the most is Cassidy. And that’s because they never took the word “interim” off his name on the company directory.
“Interim” means we haven’t finished assessing you. So if the Bruins go into their spring swoon and flame out without making the playoffs, if goalie Tuukka Rask has another tummy ache on the most important game of the year, Cassidy will end up paying a steep price.
And that’s unfair. This organization knew last October that this team was not good enough to compete with the NHL elite. How could it not know? If it didn’t know, then Jeremy Jacobs should fire Cam Neely and Don Sweeney and find someone who knows how to work in the front office of a professional sports organization.
It’s uncanny how this team is not built to last (assuming the spiral to oblivion continues). It’s not just that they’ve lost. It’s how they’ve lost.
Twice in the last four games, they’ve received penalties. One of them (against Toronto) was egregious, and there’s no question they were hosed. But still, within a minute, the opposition scored. The Toronto game was bad enough. Thursday night, against Tampa Bay, they were desperate to get the game-tying goal and instead gave up a power-play score to go down by two.
Not acceptable.
The worst part of this is the absolute lack of response to the bad fortune of being robbed in Toronto. You have to get past all that. Can you imagine the Patriots being in a four-game funk because of some call? You don’t have to imagine. They showed their mettle — if it needed to be shown — last month when they rallied and came from 25 points down to win the Super Bowl. The Red Sox rallied from a 3-0 deficit in games to beat the Yankees and go on to win the World Series.
The Bruins can’t even recover from bad call? What’s going on over there?
If the Bruins miss the playoffs again, they should just blow the whole thing up and start over. As much as I like some of those guys, they’re just not getting it done. I’d almost accept two or three years at the bottom as long as there was evidence they were trying to rebuild.
But you and I both know what’s going to happen here. The Bruins will come apart, again, like a cheap suit and miss the playoffs. Cassidy will have the word “interim” removed from his name, with “former” in its place. Neely and Sweeney will hire some other non-entity to coach the team, and they’ll stay in the penthouse to continue stirring the mediocrity around in hopes no one notices.
