Beantown won't be rebuilt in a day
ATLANTA -- So, it's midway through the first period and the Boston Bruins have given up 17 shots, taken three penalties and are down 2-0 en route to a 5-3 loss that wasn't nearly as close as the score indicated.
Just another day at the office for the NHL's poster team for disarray.
Coach Dave Lewis keeps looking up at the scoreboard, as he has for much of this forgettable young season, and we can't help but wonder whether he's looking for an ad for a cheap flight back to Detroit.
Twelve games into this all-of-a-sudden, not-so-new NHL season, the Bruins are 4-6-2 and the sole occupants of 14th place in the Eastern Conference.
Heading into Monday's disaster against the Atlanta Thrashers, the Bruins ranked 28th in goals against and 28th on the penalty kill, and that was before giving up four more Monday.
Too many penalties, not enough penalty killing, Lewis noted after.
Gee, do you think?
A year ago at this time, the Bruins were 4-5-3 en route to a 13th-place finish in the conference. Over the offseason, ownership brought in a new GM, new coach, new star free agents along the blue line and up front, and here we are, same old Bruins. Imagine Groundhog Day meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you have a sense of the plotline the Bruins continue to follow.
In the stands at Philips Arena, the new director of this production, Peter Chiarelli, appears remarkably poised for a rookie GM charged with resurrecting the flagging fortunes of this one-time Original Six force.
Of all the new GMs in the NHL this season, none face the conflicting pressures Chiarelli faces in Boston.
Fans, turned off by indifferent ownership and a legacy of indifferent play (the Bruins have not been to a conference final in 14 playoff years and have not won a Cup since 1972) are staying away in droves from the TD Banknorth Garden. The Bruins sold out their home opener this season and have since drawn five straight sub-15,000 crowds. And they aren't likely to storm back after Monday's effort.
Chiarelli believes discerning fans will come back, and quickly, if the Bruins turn a corner, and teams such as defending Cup champions Carolina, plus Buffalo and Anaheim are proof that the corner might be just down the block in the new NHL.
And therein lies both the dilemma and the challenge for the longtime Ottawa Senators front-office man.
Do you rush to that corner or bide your time?
"I went into the season and I told myself I would look at the first quarter of the year and really identify what the identity of the team is," Chiarelli told ESPN.com before Monday's game. "I am by nature a patient guy. I don't do reactionary moves."
Well, if there is a team that seems destined to test a man's patience, it is this Bruins squad.
Last week, they outplayed the Buffalo Sabres for 50 minutes, building a 4-1 lead, only to see the Sabres fill the net in the waning minutes of the game and win it in a shootout. Monday night was another frustrating exercise in puzzle-building for Chiarelli.
Take defenseman Paul Mara.
Last season as a Coyote, Mara enjoyed a breakout year with 47 points. The Bruins acquired him for Nick Boynton in the hopes of reviving a power play that ranked 25th in the league. But the big defenseman with the good hands entered Monday's game with just three assists and then promptly took two penalties in the first eight minutes that led to the Thrashers' first two goals. In the second period, though, Mara's blast, deflected by Patrice Bergeron, pulled the Bruins to within a goal, and late, with the game out of reach, he set up the Bruins' third goal.
Defenseman Zdeno Chara was the Bruins' big addition, both figuratively and literally, signing a five-year, $37.5-million deal. The former Senator is a horse, averaging a league-high 30:05 minutes a game and has chipped in eight points in 12 games. He is also minus-7, a function of never leaving the ice. On Monday night, he stood toe to toe with the Thrashers' Bobby Holik, an intimidating force if he's allowed to dominate the crease and slot, a force Chara denied on this night.
Then, there's Marc Savard, who had eight points in the Bruins' two games before Monday and was named the NHL's "first star" of the week. But Savard had managed just one goal in the team's previous nine games. He drew an assist in Monday's loss and remains a highly skilled player with defensive deficiencies and questionable leadership skills.
Throughout the Bruins' lineup there are far more questions than answers.
Highly touted rookie Phil Kessel has appeared lost for much of the season. In the Buffalo game last week, Kessel had a glorious chance to win it in overtime thanks to a great feed from Savard, but somehow flubbed the attempt. He was pointless and minus-1 in 12:40 of ice time Monday and has just five points in 12 games.
The goaltending has been spotty at best and Hannu Toivonen, thought to be ready to assume the No. 1 netminding chores, has been abysmal, giving journeyman Tim Thomas the job by default.
Lewis talked Monday night about his team's passive style, promising to keep trying to teach his team to play with more passion and jump. Yet Lewis himself has seemed powerless to change the team's regular slide into oblivion.
Against the Sabres, for instance, Lewis failed to call a timeout with his team reeling; local writers have questioned his failure to do so in other games.
With 10 points in the team's first 12 games, the Bruins are on pace to miss the playoffs once again. Chiarelli knows that. But he also knows that he wasn't brought in because things were hunky-dory in Beantown. No, he was brought in here to find success in a place where success checked out long ago.
This is a Bruins team that has become so accustomed to losing, to doing things the wrong way or just not right enough, that it has become part of the culture of the team. Just as Chiarelli's Ottawa Senators grew into winners (at least in the regular season), managing season after season to find ways to win, the Bruins have for years found only excuses and recriminations.
Chiarelli likened his team's start to a stock graph, all sharp zigs and zags. Through that, he thought he saw progress in better practices, a good outing against Tampa Bay, but he also acknowledged that there is a "hangover" from last season's upheaval.
A little more than a year ago, former GM Mike O'Connell, facing the very same issues, opted to roll the dice and deal captain Joe Thornton to San Jose for Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau and Brad Stuart.
Thornton, of course, went on to lead the NHL in scoring and win the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player, and O'Connell was out of a job, as was coach Mike Sullivan.
"That's another reason why I'm here," Chiarelli said. "They had their reasons [for the trade]. I still don't know them. And I don't want to know them. That's in the past."
But if there is a lesson to be learned from the Thornton trade, it's that rushing to that corner generally gives you skinned knees, at the least.
Chiarelli cited a Sabres team, arguably the NHL's best team so far this season, which was two or three years in the making. Or a Senators team that went through lean years before becoming a perennial 100-point team.
Does he have the patience to see his Bruins through such a process? Does ownership? The fans?
"A lot of it is confidence, whether you want to call it a culture or a learning process," Chiarelli said. "It's a long school year."
Longer, it would appear, in Boston than in many other places.
Scott Burnside is the NHL writer for ESPN.com.
