Kalman: Time Running Out For Bruins To Determine If Miscues Are Mental Or Changes Are Needed
WILMINGTON (CBS) -- The Bruins have mental problems.
At least that's what coach Claude Julien expressed after practice Friday at Ristuccia Arena in the aftermath of the Bruins' third loss in their past four games.
"To me it's a focus. The mental thing is the focus about doing the right things from start to finish," Julien said. "You've got to focus on your game and your game plan and your system and you've got to be able to do those things. But when you look at our game, when it deteriorates, we've just lost our focus. We're doing uncharacteristic things that we know we shouldn't be doing. We realize those after we see it."
Before general manager Don Sweeney invests in psychotherapy for 23 players, and we begin analyzing their dreams and how their fathers treated them when they were 6, consider the predicament Julien is in and why he has to hope the Bruins' problem is in their brains.
Julien agreed to come back as coach after lengthy discussions with Sweeney last summer. The coach gets paid royally to do what he does. The personnel, on the other hand, is Sweeney's responsibility. And for at least the first couple months of this season, Sweeney has failed to provide Julien with the requisite amount of talent to win on a regular basis. There's no help on the near horizon. There are no young studs clamoring to come up from Providence and force a turnaround. Any team-altering trade would probably require Sweeney to weaken the Bruins in other areas in order to address the weaknesses on defense.
So these are the players Julien's going to be coaching for the foreseeable future. He can't come out and say they're not talented enough. He has to hope he can instill some confidence, cajole some safer play and get the bounces going the Bruins' way enough to accumulate a playoff-caliber amount of points in the standings.
Among those players Julien's stuck with is Kevan Miller, who was the most recent goat Thursday. He turned the puck over along the wall in the third period against the Colorado Avalanche and seconds later the Bruins were behind a goal on their way to yet another loss, their sixth in seven home games.
So much was made of the Bruins' integrating younger defenseman with little-to-no NHL experience at the start of this season. Colin Miller, Joe Morrow and Zach Trotman have been given varying levels of playing time and have had their expected highs and lows. But what's been distressing about the Bruins' defeats has been that the costly miscues have come more often from Kevan Miller, Adam McQuaid, Torey Krug and Zdeno Chara – the veterans that were expected to make up for the rookies' shortcomings.
Sure, Kevan Miller, just recently passed the 100-game mark for his career and he missed a large chunk of last season because of shoulder surgery, could be considered in the group of younger guys in terms of experience. But he's 27 and he's been a top-six defenseman both in the regular season and Stanley Cup Playoffs. To his credit, he owned up to his error against the Avs and vowed to turn things around.
"It's obviously to work harder because you want to get better as you go," Miller said. "This is my third year but this is 100 and something games. I'm trying to get better every game. There's going to be ups, there's going to be downs. But you want to make sure you're consistent every night and I need to be better."
No one is questioning Miller's work ethic. He's made it to the NHL after going undrafted. But we all know about the myth of hard work making everything work out. There's a level of talent that has to be present. Kevan Miller is still making the same misplays with the puck below the goal line that he made in the playoff loss to Montreal in 2014. Every time McQuaid is asked to play an expanded role, he's exploited for his lack of speed and awareness around the net. Krug's always going to be a player that has to have the matchups in his favor to thrive.
For Miller and the others, Julien believes he has a solution.
"If you've been injured and you don't think your game is at your best, let's keep it simple, let's do the right things here and try and make the right decisions," Julien said. "Again, it's puck management. It doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be a simple game. And a lot of times less is more."
Keeping the game simple might be simpler said than done. And that's where the talent comes in. A players' ability to do what he does in practice or has been taught during a video session can be drastically hindered by an opponent and game pressure. We've seen it time and again the past several seasons, more so in 15 games of the 2015-16 season.
Another solution for Julien might be to live with more rookie errors and accept that the veterans aren't going to get any better. If Morrow and/or Trotman get in the lineup and make the same mistakes as Miller or McQuaid, maybe they'd be better at learning from those mistakes. Maybe the on-the-job training would pay off with Morrow or Trotman harnessing their talent and hitting a higher ceiling for performance than the veterans as soon as later this season. The Bruins wouldn't even be sacrificing some of the present for the future, because what do they exactly have in the present? They have a middling .500 team with the worst penalty kill in the NHL.
Sometimes a team that can only put together 10 or 20 strong minutes in a game isn't the victim of mental lapses. Sometimes such performances mean a team is only capable of playing well for that long. That's when it's time to change the players and search for the right combination.
Julien doesn't sound like a coach ready to shake up his lineup. But that American Thanksgiving deadline Cam Neely loves for its ability to forecast the playoff eight, more than kids love it for the Macy's parade, is approaching. And it looks like the Bruins are going to have to do more than just think the game better to make sure they're sitting where they want to be when it's time to carve the turkey.
Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.
