In his season-ending news conference, Chiarelli was asked if he was working on an extension for Claude Julien. The usually unflappable Chiarelli was caught off-guard, and not just because Julien had only just completed the first season of a multiyear extension announced prior to the start of the 2009-10 campaign.
No, Chiarelli’s bemused reaction had more to do with the fact that he had spent so much of the previous 12 months fielding questions about firing Julien.
“That’s actually the first time someone has asked me that question about our coaches,” Chiarelli said. “I don’t know what to say. They are currently under contract into subsequent years, so nothing forthcoming.”
It’s amazing what winning a championship can do. Julien has gone from being the subject of constant speculation about his job security to being the toast of the town. And Julien can now rightfully take his place among the elite coaches in the NHL.
With the retirement of Jacques Lemaire in New Jersey and Marc Crawford getting fired in Dallas this offseason, Julien is one of just seven current coaches with a Stanley Cup on his resume and one of five still with the club he led to a title. He ranks 10th among active coaches in career wins with 298, and all nine of the men ahead of him have coached more games. Julien’s career winning percentage of .596 ranks eighth, and only three of the coaches ahead of him have coached more games in the league.
Julien has won 179 of those games in Boston, ranking him fifth all time in Bruins history. After the team went through seven coaches in the decade before hiring Julien in 2007, he’s given the franchise much needed stability in guiding it back first to relevance in the Boston sports scene, then its first championships in 39 years.
But while this year’s Cup run may have changed the perception of him, Julien insists it won’t change him as a person or his approach as a coach.
“I don’t know, the one thing I can tell you is whatever way they see me, I’ve always said that I will never change as a person,” Julien said at the club’s breakup day. “I came up from a modest background and I’ve always tried to remain modest. I’m appreciative for everything that has happened to me in my career, more than I would have ever expected.
“I played hockey to become an NHL hockey player and played a few games in the NHL but never became a regular, but I got a second chance at coaching,” Julien added. “And I don’t take things for granted. You hear me say it’s a humbling game. It is a humbling game. Next year is a brand new challenge and when next year starts I’m going to put the Stanley Cup aside and work on another one. That’s just the way I am so it doesn’t really matter to me, I just hope that people look at me as a normal person. And I told my wife the other day, if I could have won the Stanley Cup and just walked out of that rink and gone home, I would have been a happy guy.”
In truth, Bruins fans should have been happy with Julien’s performance even before winning the Cup. In his first season in Boston, Julien took over a team that had finished dead last in the division the previous two seasons under two different coaches, got it into the playoffs and pushed the top-seeded Canadiens to seven games in the opening round.
In his second season, Julien led the Bruins to the top seed in the East and their first playoff series victory in a decade, taking home the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year along the way.
In his third year, the Bruins won a playoff series in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1991 and 1992, but a monumental collapse in the second round overshadowed everything else. The Bruins blew a 3-0 series lead and a 3-0 lead in Game 7 at the Garden to Philadelphia.
Few coaches survive such a catastrophic loss, but Chiarelli stuck with Julien, much to the dismay of many fans. Calls for Julien’s head persisted right into the playoffs, where the common perception was that Julien was coaching for his job in the opening rounds. Chiarelli didn’t necessarily share that opinion, and his faith was rewarded, while the Bruins players never wavered in their support for their coach.
“I don’t read or watch too much media, so I don’t know too much about what they were saying, but obviously there’s people who were saying he should have been fired 20 times by now, right?” Bruins forward Milan Lucic said after the season.
“Obviously he’s the only coach I’ve had in the NHL, but he’s easy to play for,” Lucic added. “The way he wants us to play is perfectly fit for my game and perfectly fit for this team. He’s done a great job as a coach building an identity for this hockey club.”
For his part, Julien has always taken a philosophical approach to the lack of job security inherent in coaching.
“It’s something I’ve had to live with forever, so I guess I don’t know any different and at some point you just have to accept it for what it is,” Julien said at the height of the outside criticism he was facing during the season. “I guess the more experience you get, the less stress you get about it because you know you’re going to go out there and do the best you can, and if that is not good enough then you have to move on.”
The Bruins are fortunate they did not decide to move on from Julien when so many were advocating his removal. Instead, they moved on through four rounds of playoffs to their first title in nearly four decades, while Julien was finally recognized as having moved up into the upper echelon of NHL coaches.
NESN.com Bruins beat writer Douglas Flynn will be answering one question facing the Bruins this offseason each day until Aug. 8.
Sunday, August 7: Will a healthy Milan Lucic build off his breakthrough 30-goal campaign after a frustrating postseason?
