Hurley: Bruce Cassidy looks like Don Sweeney’s scapegoat for mediocre Bruins

BOSTON — Any way you slice it, Bruce Cassidy got a raw deal.

While yes, it’s certainly reasonable for the Bruins brass to determine that a new voice is needed in the locker room, it’s nevertheless preposterous that the head coach has been axed while the general manager who guided the team into mediocrity not only remains in place but was also the one who fired the head coach and is the one who will lead the search for Cassidy’s replacement.

The reality is, the Bruins have not had a roster built to contend for championships for quite some time. Under certain scenarios — like getting the Maple Leafs and then two wild-card teams in the Eastern Conference playoffs, then getting an overachieving Blues team in the Cup Final — the Bruins could certainly come close to a championship. And they sure did in the spring of 2019.

But outside of that near-miss, there really hasn’t been a case in recent Bruins history where the team failed to maximize the potential, based on the talent on the team.

In 2018, they lost in five games to the Lightning, who were a much better hockey team.

In the bubble in 2020, they once again lost in five games to the Lightning. Once again, the Lightning were clearly a better hockey team. They won the Cup to prove it.

In 2021, the Bruins lost in six games to the Islanders, who were — you guessed it — a better team. This year, the Bruins ran into a better team — the Carolina Hurricanes, in this case — in the first round.

The commonality in all of those seasons was that the Bruins weren’t the better team. They’ve been good enough to make the playoffs but not much more. They’ve been built to be mediocre. And now the coach is paying the price instead of the GM.

Why that may be the case can reasonably be speculated. The fact that GM Don Sweeney and team president Cam Neely are old friends from their playing days certainly doesn’t provide the best in terms of optics at this point, as it’s incredibly difficult to look at the body of work with Sweeney since 2015 in a favorable light.

The tenure obviously began with the mishap in the middle of the first round of the 2015 draft, when Sweeney selected Jakub Zboril, Jake DeBrusk, and Zach Senyshyn with three straight picks, from Nos. 13-15. The likes of Mathew Barzal, Kyle Connor, Thomas Chabot, Brock Boeser, Travis Konecny and Sebatian Aho were all available at the time. Everybody misses a pick along the way; missing three straight is a rather unfortunate run of decision-making.

That continued when Sweeney made the baffling trade of a third-round pick for Zac Rinaldo, a player with a skillset from a bygone era. Rinaldo would end up contributing three points in 52 games for the Bruins but managed to pick up just one suspension during his one season in Boston.

A similar lust for physicality would later lead Sweeney to take time on Day 1 of free agency in 2020 to sign Kevan Miller, who had missed 121 of the previous 124 games due to injury. He ended up missing 35 of the Bruins’ 67 games, didn’t play well when he was on the ice, and retired after the season.

Outside of Charlie McAvoy — an obvious hit and success story for Sweeney — the Bruins haven’t developed a championship-caliber defensive corps or anything close to it.

And outside of the magical trio of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak up front, a lack of secondary scoring has been the Bruins’ calling card for years. David Krejci was left to whither away on the second line without proper linemates, and the Bruins ultimately suffered for it.

Forcing out Zdeno Chara, who was the second-longest-tenured captain in the illustrious history of the Bruins, may have been the right move for a championship team. But doing it so that Jeremy Lauzon, Urho Vaakanainen and Jakub Zboril could get more ice time was absolutely not the right move in any way.

Prioritizing Derek Forbort and Nick Foligno to solve some problems a year later obviously did nothing to help.

Throughout his tenure, Sweeney’s overpaid for players — like sending out first-round picks for Ondrej Kase, Rick Nash, and Hampus Lindholm, or paying far too much money to David Backes, Matt Beleskey, Jimmy Hayes, John Moore, or Nick Foligno. The deals that have been good ones — like acquiring Marcus Johansson and Charlie Coyle before the 2019 deadline — were not cheap, with the rental of Johansson costing the Bruins a second and fourth-round pick, and the Coyle acquisition costing another fourth-rounder. Lindholm may well be a solid long-term addition on the blue line, but he’ll be there with a $6.5 million cap hit for the next eight seasons.

Sweeney also sent out two picks to acquire John-Michael Liles in his first trade deadline, while also sending a second-round pick and a fourth-round pick to acquire Lee Stempniak. That’s the same Lee Stempniak whom the Bruins could have had for short money and no picks but elected not to after his PTO prior to that season.

Sending away a second-round pick and a fourth-round pick for Lee Stempniak, while sending a third-round pick for Zac Rinaldo, while failing to find a draft night trade partner before completely whiffing on two of three first-round picks was a troubling start to Sweeney’s general managing tenure. It has since gotten a bit better, sure. But how, exactly, could it have gotten any worse?

And while the 2015 draft has long been a sore spot for the Bruins organization, the reality is the drafts since that year have not gotten much better. Again, McAvoy was a home run pick at No. 14 overall in 2016. But the Bruins also spent a first-round pick on Trent Frederic that year, and a second-round pick on Ryan Lindgren. Lindgren has actually become a contributing NHL defenseman … for the New York Rangers, after he was traded away in the Rick Nash deal.

Jeremy Swayman was a solid find in the fourth round of 2017, but the top two Bruins picks that year — Urho Vaakanainen and Jack Studnicka — have not given the Bruins much of anything. Likewise for the top picks in 2018, Axel Andersson (57th overall) and Jakub Lauko (77th overall). The 2019 draft, with John Beecher as the team’s top pick, has yet to yield anything for the NHL club. Same with 2020. Perhaps 2021 top pick Fabian Lysell will break the Bruins’ four-year streak of getting little to no contributions out of the draft. Perhaps he will not.

The reality is, for as long as the Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak trio was intact, the Bruins were always going to be a playoff team. With a disciplined defensive structure and solid goaltending — neither of which has been a question under Cassidy — the Bruins would always be good enough to be … good enough. But they never had the roster to be great.

That’s why, if you look at this one from 5,000 feet, you see a coach who more or less got what he could have gotten out of the team given to him. 

He took over for a team in 2017 that was 26-23-6, leading them to an 18-8-1 record down the stretch, which earned them a spot in the playoffs and built a lot of positive momentum going into the next year. They’d end up going 50-20-12 that next season, the second-best record in the conference, before running into the budding buzzsaw that was the Tampa Bay Lightning. ((In a solid picture of the Bruins’ roster shortcomings, 39-year-old Brian Gionta was on the ice for the Lightning’s overtime goal in Game 4. It was his lone active game of the playoffs, and his hockey career ended following that series.)

As head coach, Cassidy never missed the playoffs, and never had a down year. Again, perhaps the Bruins feel a change is needed in the locker room. Given the nature of the sport — and all sports, for that matter — that happens.

(Quick aside: Perhaps, if Cassidy has fallen out of favor with Patrice Bergeron, like he had with David Krejci, then this move is a Hail Mary of sorts to realign both top-line centers for another run in 2022-23. If that’s the motivation to fire the coach here, it is … certainly an odd course of action to pursue. Bergeron will turn 37 this year, is unsigned, will be coming off elbow surgery, and at has never had a public issue with Cassidy. Krejci is 36 and seems quite happy to be living and playing in his native Czech Republic.)

But from the outside, this one just feels like a case where ownership wanted a deeper run, and somebody had to pay the price for it. The Jacobs family fully trusts Neely, and Neely believes in Sweeney, thus leaving Cassidy as the odd man out. Objectively speaking, the Bruins have not been built to win Cups for some time. The firing of Cassidy leaves us to question how objectively things are being seen on Causeway Street.

Nobody ever said the business of pro sports wasn’t cruel. That doesn’t make the occasional reminder any less jarring.

You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.