After the Bruins' embarrassing 3-0 loss to the Penguins on March 18, Mark Recchi was asked if there was any hope left to salvage the season.
"It’s frustrating, for sure, and I know things look bleak right now, but I still believe we’re a playoff team and we can make a run once we get there," Recchi answered earnestly. "We've had a lot of injuries, but really, it takes digging deep, and I believe the guys in [this dressing room] can do that. I believe in this team."
It appears that Recchi was right and saw something that the media and fans didn't see at the time. In a span of just under seven weeks, this team has seemingly corrected every one of its weaknesses and now finds itself headed to the second round of the playoffs after knocking off the third-seeded Sabres in six games. Everything has come together at the right time, and it's a credit to the never-quit attitude and hard work of the players, as well as the willingness of head coach Claude Julien to make the proper adjustments when necessary.
"I think we finally acknowledged that whether because of injuries or just some guys hitting walls, we realized what we were — a low-scoring team — and we realized that we were good at forechecking and defense, and we played to our strengths," Recchi said on Tuesday. "Instead of trying to be something we weren't, we made a few minor adjustments and stuck within our system. But really, too, I think the big thing is that we stuck together as a group and really just went about our business, not worrying about what others said and what we couldn't control."
In a conference call with the media on Tuesday, Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli had a very similar assessment of how this team — which entered the 2009-10 season with such high hopes — fell far short of expectations for most of the season and then began to achieve them when it mattered most.
"There wasn't much of a change from last year to this year in terms of the overall core, so really, you'd expect there not to be much of a change in overall play," Chiarelli said. "Now you'd expect there to be little nuances and additions and subtractions that ultimately prove to change the chemistry and how you play, but for whatever reason, there were a lot of things that happened [that contributed to] why we didn't perform, and we spent a large part of the year trying to figure out [what the problem was].
"The bottom line is that the team really strapped it on for the last 15 games, and I attribute that to experience, and I attribute that to the players playing more to the level of expectations. We got into the playoffs, and now we've won a round, so we'll see where we go from here."
Heading into this year's trade deadline, the Bruins were heavily criticized for losing out on unrestricted free agent-to-be Ilya Kovalchuk, who was dealt to the Devils. They then failed to land a scorer at the actual deadline, instead opting to deal for Florida defenseman Dennis Seidenberg. But while the Bruins didn't exactly light up the scoreboard down the stretch run, they have scored 16 goals in six games thus far in the postseason.
"At the deadline, we wanted to mix up the chemistry on defense a bit and put people in different roles," Chiarelli said. "There was much talk about us not getting a scoring forward, but we did what we did. I know I went in and talked to the team and told them that I believed they could score better. I think you saw, in this series, that we were willing to go to harder areas to score, and actually, we were shooting better playing against a world-class goalie [in Buffalo's Ryan Miller]. We believed that there was the ability in our forwards to produce."
The power play — which finished the season with a measly 16.6 percent success rate — came alive in the Buffalo series, going 6-for-22, to help the Bruins advance. That success, combined with the carryover success of a penalty kill that ranked third overall in the regular season and killed all 19 Buffalo power plays, was a major factor in the series.
"I think the obvious thing that sticks out is the special teams,” Chiarelli said, when asked which aspect of his team's game forced the Sabres to change their approach. "We've had success all year on the kill, so that wasn't really something [the Sabres] had to respond to because they knew they would be facing a strong penalty kill, and that's what they faced. So that certainly was no surprise to them.
"But on the power play, I thought we made some good adjustments. I thought we changed entries, which was good. You saw different types of entries. You saw the soft, high dump. You saw the quick pass to the strong-side winger, and he would gain entry. And you saw different entries that I think they had to respond to. I think it caught them off guard a little bit."
Chiarelli was quick to give credit where it was due.
"I have to give credit to the players that were on the special teams, but also to the coaching staff that made some adjustments," Chiarelli said. "We struggled all year, and obviously we responded, and that threw [Buffalo] for a loop a little bit."
But the power play wasn’t the only adjustment the Bruins made. Chiarelli was impressed with the way in which his coaching staff, specifically Julien, was willing to change.
"I thought he made very good adjustments," Chiarelli said of the 2008-09 Jack Adams Award winner. "I thought that when it came to crunch time, he changed his approach, which I think is a huge testament to a coach and his staff to be able to feel the changes that have to be done and to actually make those changes."
So now the Bruins will await their second-round opponent — the Flyers or Penguins — but what they won't do is look back and think that just because they corrected their faults in time to win a playoff round, they have a clear path to the Stanley Cup.
As Recchi pointed out, the team has done a great job of "going about its business," and now with Marc Savard making a comeback, it must continue to do the same. The Bruins bandwagon is filling up again, but the drivers aren't about to listen to their passengers and take their feet off the pedal.
"We can't let this success make us think it will be any easier [in the second round]," Recchi said. "We believed in ourselves, and we proved a lot of people wrong. Maybe we have to prove some people right, but we don’t really care. We need to play our game and not worry about anything else."
