Put up-tempo plans on ice
Bruins don’t have players to change
BUFFALO — A synonym for the word transition would be change. And the Bruins are paradoxically caught in the switches regarding that word, transition.
At a time when transition — the quick change from defense to offense — is the style in vogue in the NHL, the B’s are a team badly in need of a roster transition. They are woefully ill-suited to the style of hockey they desire to play.
General manager Don Sweeney and president Cam Neely passionately want their team to play the fast, up-tempo, stretch-the-ice hockey we saw from the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins.
But wanting to play that way, and having the players to do so, are two different matters. If you ain’t got the legs and the quickness and the skill, brother, it’s not going to work.
The biggest impediment in the Bruins’ transition to the up-tempo style of play is the presence of four decidedly down-tempo defensemen in Zdeno Chara, Dennis Seidenberg, Adam McQuaid and Kevan Miller.
There can be no fast-break attack unless there are blueliners making quick breakout passes and/or quickly skating the puck up themselves.
So here Sweeney is, little over 13 months since taking over the team, continuing his efforts to reinvent the Bruins. He faces a daunting challenge.
Today, we enter a crucial stretch of eight or nine days in which Sweeney has to dramatically change and improve his roster. The moves he makes during NHL draft weekend, which opens with Round 1 tonight, and then in the week before the opening of free agency on July 1 and the days after, will go a long way toward determining if the 2016-17 Bruins can find those extra few points in the standings to squeeze into a playoff slot.
Or slip farther from postseason contention.
“It’s a really challenging time for them, because of transitions,” said one longtime Eastern Conference management person here yesterday, meaning, in this context, the quick switch from defense to offense.
“Just because they have a few guys who aren’t part of that. The big guy (Chara), right? It’s a real challenge. It’s really a tough thing, particularly when you’ve won. There’s such a strong sense of allegiance to him. With the next group — (Patrice) Bergeron, (David) Krejci and (Brad) Marchand — the window is still open. They’re really good. But the big question is Chara.
“The window is still open for this team, but can you replenish and reload that quickly? That’ll be the question. The three kids they took (in Round 1) last year have to make it. I don’t mean this year, but soon. There’s so much excitement when you get to do something like that in the first round (three successive picks), but then all of a sudden people realize it’s going to take those kids two, three, four years.
“So are you really rebuilding right now? Because where’s Bergeron going to be in four years?”
As we might have mentioned once or twice, one of the greatest strengths of this B’s team has long been coach Claude Julien. Playing his system, the Bruins for years were, “a sum of the parts team,” a club that was better than its individual parts suggested.
That has not been the case the past two years, in part, because the team is fixated on the up-tempo attack and long stretch passes.
When the Bruins executed Julien’s system well, they took an approach to team defense not unlike what old friend Mike Sullivan’s Penguins did: Work really hard to take away the opposition’s time and space. Pressure the puck front and back. Force turnovers in all three zones, and turn them into offensive chances.
“You know what Pittsburgh did this year which was interesting?” said the club official. “They made defense cool. They didn’t play New Jersey Devils-style trap defense, sitting back and waiting. They played aggressive, unbelievably high-paced, fun defense. And that turned directly into offense.”
And that’s the style of hockey the Bruins can already play and that should be the game plan. So why force a transition to a type of game for which the Bruins just don’t have the right players?