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Boston Bruins and their Claude Julien problem (Trending Topics)

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It feels like the Boston Bruins have been firing Claude Julien forever.

And the thing is, at this point, it’s really a case of either [poop] or get off the pot, because this is getting ridiculous.

You want to read the “It would be a mistake to fire Claude Julien” takes, you can do it anywhere. Here’s one from Pete Blackburn. Here’s another from Travis Yost. And if Fluto Shinzawa is saying it, you know it’s the right take to have.

The reasons why you don’t fire Claude Julien are self-evident: The Bruins are the best possession team in the league. The Bruins have one of the lowest team shooting percentages in the league. Some of the team’s best players are having not-great seasons. The Bruins have serious roster problems that get worse the deeper down the lineup you get. The Bruins haven’t drafted particularly well in recent years.

This doesn’t need re-explaining.

And yet everyone is just kinda sitting around saying, “It’s gonna happen soon.”

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Again, we’ve been saying that for a while — what, since before Peter Chiarelli got canned? — but now it really and truly feels like this is the big one. The Bruins are higher in the standings right now than they have any right to be based on the quality of the roster with which they entered the season, sitting second in the division albeit with about a thousand more games played than everyone. But the thing is those are banked points and it’s not like the teams behind them are world-beaters (maturing Toronto aside).

The Bruins’ path to the playoffs this year always seemed as though it was going to boil down to punching above their weight (i.e. PDOing their way into a wild card position or, maybe, third in the Atlantic). Seems likely that they’d mostly have been able to tread water, staying competitive but ultimately falling short in the end. And that’s when Julien would finally get fired.

But because the Julien has them playing a new, faster style better suited to masking some of their very obvious deficiencies, they’re just a really good team that’s where it is despite some of the worst luck in the league.

Sweeney doesn’t want to accept the “bad luck” argument, especially because they’ve been outscored 10-5 in the last two games, against the Islanders and Red Wings, two teams that are very definitively terrible. The implication here, that somehow a stern talking to caused the team to start shooting more effectively after being called out by their GM, is of course nonsense, especially because it used a three-game sample as proof that something had been figured out. But if Sweeney’s now complaining about “We don’t hit the net enough on our shot attempts so the CF% doesn’t matter and they’re gonna have a bad shooting percentage all year,” well, that scans as looking really intensely at the relatively small dark cloud and not its obvious, mathematically supported silver lining.

It seems to me that Sweeney — a Barney Fife analog insofar as he seems to have gotten where he is despite bumbling around at nearly every turn just because everyone likes him — really wants to have a lot of evidence to point to when he finally pulls that one “Fire The Coach” bullet out of his breast pocket and fires it in desperation. He literally told Shinzawa less than two weeks ago that he’s keeping those options open, and specifically identified the power play as an issue. Since that initial conversation, the Bruins have gone 4 of 19 on the power play (21.1 percent), after starting the year 22 of 129 (17.1 percent). Small sample, but it’s better, so now the goalposts are moved.

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“You’d like to think everything will regress back to the mean and bear out,” Sweeney told Shinzawa a few weeks ago. “You stick with that process and the conviction of that process. We do have a lot of things people would point to and say, ‘Would this would be a dangerous team if they got hot in terms of a playoff environment, because they have structure?’ Yes. But the bottom line is if you don’t get in, it doesn’t matter. You have to find a way.”

So now the issue is the accuracy of the Bruins’ many shot attempts — and hey, they take more per 60 than any team in the league at 5-on-5 — except that, of course, they put more than half those attempts on net. They’re actually 13th in the league in terms of percentage of 5-on-5 shot attempts that end up on net. There is a 1.5 percent correlation between the percentage of your shots you get on goal and your shooting percentage, which is effectively non-existent. And even if it were meaningful, the Bruins are still in the top half of the league at it, so they’d theoretically be fine.

The question has to be why move the goalposts?

And the answer is the obvious: Someone has to pay for what might soon be three straight springs without postseason hockey in Boston, and why would Sweeney allow it to be him? The problem on his end is that chief executive Charlie Jacobs, whose papa still signs the paychecks, indicates a pretty clear understanding that this isn’t a Julien issue. He told the Boston Herald this week, “That’s not my call to make. That’s on Cam and Donnie.”

It’s generally better to let the hockey guys make the hockey decisions, but in this particular case Sweeney seems like he’s steering his ship straight into the rocks so no one notices all the dereliction of his other duties as GM (making smart trades, drafting well, signing free agents responsibly, and so on). But the message is clear: Fire Julien, that’s your decision.

But if you do, and things don’t improve, you’re next.

Because it really does bear repeating: Sweeney has been in the front office forever and was in the room or personally pulling the trigger on trading Tyler Seguin, Dougie Hamilton, and Reilly Smith. He gave Matt Beleskey $3.8 million, and traded Smith for then extended Jimmy Hayes at $2.3 million. He signed David Backes, he extended Kevan Miller and Adam McQuaid. He hasn’t found a reasonable backup in a league where backups grow on trees (and that in particular has probably cost the Bruins about four points in the standings).

Who fixes these problems? Or more specifically, which coach addresses them in a way that makes the Bruins more competitive? Process-wise the Bruins cannot be improved upon this season. Most underlying stats have them near or at the top of the league. So who that’s out there comes in and makes the “changes” the team “needs?”

When you’re firing your coach, which the Bruins seem to want to do any minute here, the question you always have to ask is, “Who’s better?” Julien is probably the fourth-best coach in the league. Of guys with lengthy résumés, I’d put him behind Babcock, Boudreau and Quenneville in the Behind the Net era, and ahead of guys like Bylsma, Hitchcock, McLellan, Laviolette, and a few more. (I’m holding out judgment on newer guys like Cooper and Peters, but they’re trending in the right direction.)

People who have been paying attention have said all along about the Bruins that Julien is a good coach being asked to work magic with an increasingly mediocre-or-worse roster. This year might be his masterpiece in terms of the underlying results he’s wringing out of an uninspiring group. It’s not especially difficult to be a 55 percent xGF% team when you have the roster the Bruins did in 2011, and to look better than that when you have one of the best goaltending seasons ever mopping up any mistakes. It’s really hard to do the same thing when you have this crew.

If the Bruins fire Julien — and it certainly looks and feels that way — they’re making a huge mistake. You already knew that. But the only real means of improving the team is either blowing up the roster (short-term) or getting a new front office (long-term).

Sweeney’s not going to fire himself. Someone will do that for him a year from now. And if they’re feeling charitable, they might even keep Julien’s replacement, who’ll probably be revealed any day now.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.

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