Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli has spent the past five years collecting the pieces he hoped would come together to fit into a championship puzzle, and after Boston ended a 39-year Stanley Cup drought with Wednesday's Game 7 victory in Vancouver, he was able to reflect on just how well his plan did come together.
"Pretty much everyone has a five-year plan and so did we," Chiarelli said Friday at the TD Garden. "And it's not like it fell exactly into place, but we were adding certain elements to get to that point.
"And it's happened, so I'm a genius," added Chiarelli with a laugh.
Chiarelli inherited some key pieces and put more in place in his first four seasons, but it was in the past year that he made the moves to complete the quest. He re-signed defenseman Dennis Seidenberg last summer after acquiring him at last year's trade deadline, then swung a deal for Nathan Horton and Gregory Campbell in June. At this year's deadline, three separate trades brought in forwards Chris Kelly and Rich Peverley and defenseman Tomas Kaberle.
"When you make deals it's our job to be fairly confident that they're going to work out," Chiarelli said. "So the deals that we made, really for me it started back when we got Dennis Seidenberg. We had to be fairly aggressive with that deal for a couple of reasons. We obviously didn't have him in the playoffs [last year when he was injured], but he was obviously a big part of our team this year. And then the Horton deal was obviously significant, and we felt like we had to be aggressive there again before the draft because there's a flurry of deals at the draft.
"Seids, Horton, they're both big, strong players and that was something we've always tried to have," Chiarelli added. "And of course if you fast-forward to the trade deadline or before the trade deadline, those were pieces that we had to do, we were pressed to do. We were going to improve the team regardless of what happened to Savvy [Marc Savard], but we needed to backfill so to speak. And we needed to do it earlier to get ahead of the race and also to get the guys in there a little bit earlier. You know Seids, Horts, Pev [Peverley], Chris Kelly and Kaberle, these were guys that we've always been targeting. You know you can have a wish list and it's just going out and executing and getting it. And that's what the hard part is."
Few could argue with the contributions Seidenberg, Horton, Kelly and Peverley made. Seidenberg was immense all postseason, forming a dominant defensive pair with Zdeno Chara that shut down every opposing team's top threats, including Vancouver's vaunted Sedin twins. Horton scored a pair of Game 7 winners to keep Boston's Cup run alive, while Kelly was a key two-way performer and Peverley stepped into Horton's spot on the top line in Final when Horton was sidelined with a concussion.
Kaberle was arguably Chiarelli's only misfire, as he cost the Bruins first- and second-round draft picks and highly-regarded prospect Joe Colborne, then struggled for much of his stay in Boston. But Chiarelli even defended Kaberle, whose play did pick up considerably when it mattered most against Tampa Bay and Vancouver in the final two series.
"I know Tomas has been criticized," Chiarelli said. "The expectations were very high on him when he came in but you have to understand that, I go to him because he seems to be, of the group that we brought in, he seems to be the one that is most vulnerable [to criticism]. He brings, and you saw it more against Vancouver, he brings the ability to both slow down the play and speed it up with his passing and skating. And he freezes guys in the neutral zone. He makes great passes. He skates into the trap. You saw it against Tampa Bay. I think he was our top defensive scorer. So anyways, he was a real important component here and I know he was criticized for a time. But I'll continue to defend him because he's a good person and he brought a lot to the back end."
All of Chiarelli's additions brought important ingredients needed to complete the club's championship recipe. They also shared one consistent trait that Chiarelli sought in all the players he added to the mix.
"The common theme in the plan was character," Chiarelli said. "I remember talking about [being] hard to play against, closing gaps. It's character and at the end of the day that's what I wanted for us. My father was at Games 3 and 4 and after Game 4 I said to him, 'We're going to win the cup.' And he said, 'I think you will too, but why?' I said because there's too much resolve in the locker room. You could just feel it and at the end of the day that's what happened."
