On March 26, 2007, the aftermath of the previous night’s consumption was already accumulating in a garbage barrel inside the Bruins’ dressing room at the Senators’ practice facility in Ottawa.
The day before, the Penguins had rolled the Bruins, 5-0. The rout encouraged the Bruins to douse that dumpster fire’s last flickers at some of Ottawa’s finest nighttime establishments.
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Things were going to get worse.
The way Andrew Alberts remembers it happening, first-year coach Dave Lewis handed off practice duties to Doug Houda, his assistant. Houda’s first task was to deliver the bad news.
“Houds opened the door and said, ‘Hey guys, on the ice in 20. And don’t bother bringing pucks,’” the ex-Bruin recalled. “We’re like, ‘Fuck.’ Guys started to sweat. They’re drinking water. We know what’s coming.”
The Bruins were facing an hour-long, no-pucks bag skate to compensate for the 60 minutes of work they declined to submit the day earlier. Before the players left the room to meet their fate, though, their first-year captain had something to say.
“Hey, we’ve got to do this,” said Zdeno Chara, according to former teammate Bobby Allen. “Don’t hang your head. Don’t complain. Don’t slam your stick. Let’s get out there, handle our business and be done with it.”
The next day, the Bruins beat the Senators, 3-2. It was their last win of the season. Six losses later, the 35-41-6 Bruins secured 13th place in the Eastern Conference. It was the first and worst season of the Chara Era.
“The end was definitely the hardest,” Alberts said. “I remember there being a long stretch where we didn’t have many wins. Every day, you’re going to the rink thinking, ‘What the hell can we do today at practice to get better to win some games?’ ”
Chara has played 1,023 games as a Bruin. Whether there will be a 1,024th is unknown. The 43-year-old awaits the format of the new season as he plans for what could be his 15th year as a Bruin.
Chara has won one Stanley Cup in Boston. He led the Bruins to two other final appearances. He won a Norris Trophy.
In retrospect, as poorly as that first season went, Chara laid the foundation for future individual and team achievement in the star-crossed 2006-07 campaign.
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At the time, it was just difficult to see.
Change, and too much of it
On July 1, 2006, Chara signed a five-year, $37.5 million contract with the Bruins. On the same day, Marc Savard signed a four-year, $20 million deal.
The newbies had company. The Bruins had hired Lewis two days earlier. Houda and Marc Habscheid were new assistants. First-year general manager Peter Chiarelli, who took over for interim GM Jeff Gorton, arrived just after Chara and oversaw the rebuild. New hockey operations hires included Jim Benning, director of player personnel, and Don Sweeney, director of player development. Phil Kessel, the No. 5 pick in 2006, was bidding to make the team. Even the charter plane was a first-year arrival.
Everything had gone wrong in the 2005-06 season. Then-GM Mike O’Connell pursued Alexei Zhamnov as Plan B to Peter Forsberg. O’Connell signed past-their-prime free agents such as Tom Fitzgerald, Brian Leetch and Dave Scatchard. He traded Joe Thornton.
O’Connell paid for these moves with his job. Coach Mike Sullivan was also shown the door.
Their replacements flexed muscles of organizational accomplishment. Chiarelli came from the powerhouse Senators. Lewis’ fingers sparkled with the three rings he won in Detroit.
Their arrivals, followed by Chara’s, signaled brighter days to come. Chara’s signing was especially welcome for Alberts, a like-minded defensive defenseman just one season removed from Boston College.
“He came in guns blazing,” said Alberts. “Everybody was impressed by him in training camp. That I got to play with him was beyond my wildest dreams. In scrimmages prior to the year, Z was on my team. On the bench, he was like, ‘Hey, Albie,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this guy knows my name.’ He goes, ‘We’re going to play together this year. You stay back and let me do my work.’ I’m like, ‘Sure, whatever you want, Z.’ ”
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The rush of systemwide turnover did not promise immediate traction. To complement Chara, Savard and Kessel, Chiarelli stuffed his roster with free agent flotsam: Wade Brookbank, Nathan Dempsey, Shean Donovan, Brian Finley, Jeff Hoggan, Mark Mowers, Petr Tenkrat, Jason York. They did not have enough dependable holdovers like Patrice Bergeron and Glen Murray. Even Tim Thomas could not singlehandedly turn back the tide allowed by the leaky Bruins.
In retrospect, it was no surprise that the Bruins opened the season with an 8-3 drubbing against Florida. They won only four of their first 13 games. Chiarelli’s Nov. 13 acquisition of Stanislav Chistov from Anaheim did not exactly turn things around. In December, Kessel was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Even though he was playing nearly half of every game, Chara could not drag the team out of the ditch.
“Maybe he tried to do a little too much his first year, on and off the ice,” said Matt Keator, Chara’s agent. “He learned as the season went on to relax and grow. You can’t win the game by yourself as a captain. He wasn’t used to losing. He came from great teams in Ottawa. He was so frigging determined to make the team a contending team. He realized as the year went on, it takes time.”
More moves to make
The losses — a 10-2 stomping to Toronto on Jan. 4, 2007, stands out — continued. Deeper renovation was required. Chiarelli had to decide who’d stay and who would go.
Marco Sturm, one of the three pieces O’Connell acquired from San Jose for Thornton, was a keeper. Brad Stuart and Wayne Primeau were not. On Feb. 10, 2007, Chiarelli traded Stuart and Primeau to Calgary for Andrew Ference and Chuck Kobasew. Ference would wear a letter and become a fixture on the 2011 championship team.
Seventeen days later, Chiarelli wheeled Paul Mara to the Rangers for Aaron Ward. The same day, he acquired Dennis Wideman from St. Louis for Brad Boyes. Ward and Wideman would spend time as Chara’s partners.
The repairs didn’t produce short-term spikes. The Bruins kept losing.
On March 16, the Bruins were scheduled to fly to New York for a game against the Rangers the next day. A snowstorm grounded their flight.
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Conditions did not improve the following morning. Their only choice was to bus to New York to make that night’s game. A mid-drive pit stop did not improve morale.
“I travel that way for work now,” Allen said. “In Connecticut, I see the Texas Roadhouse we stopped at right outside New Haven. We all piled in there as a team. This is the Boston Bruins playing the New York Rangers that night, and we’re sitting in a barbecue joint trying to have a pregame meal. Then we jump back on the bus and go to New York City. Needless to say, not all the boys were mentally there that night. It was brutal. It was bad.”
Like 7-0 bad.
“We showed up a half hour or 45 minutes before the game and just got smoked,” Alberts said. “We shouldn’t have even gone down there. We should have just taken the loss. It was that bad. We had every excuse in the book. We even talked about it before the game. And we still went out there and shit the bed at Madison Square Garden. It was just terrible.”
The 5-0 Pittsburgh blowup came four games later. That night, once the Bruins arrived in Ottawa, Alberts saw Lewis pull Savard aside. After the team checked in at the hotel, Alberts had a question for his roommate.
“I go, ‘Savvy, what did Lewie say?’ He goes, ‘If I were you guys, I would go out and get absolutely shitcanned tonight,’ ” Alberts said. “So we’re like, ‘Fucking green light. The coach is saying go out, rip it up and paint the town.’ That’s what we did. Everybody was out until 4 or 5 that morning.”
Nobody knows if word of the carousing got back to the bosses. Alberts’ opinion is that Chiarelli, furious about the Pittsburgh performance, issued the command for the bag skate. From what Alberts remembers, Chiarelli watched the entire session from the stands.
“Oh my God, that was just miserable,” Allen said. “At that level, nobody likes enduring that. That was a tough time for guys just coming off a tough loss. We basically got skated to death. Looking back now, 12 years later, it’s funny. But going through it, it sucks.”
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The season ended two weeks later with a 6-3 loss to Ottawa. Just over two months later, Chiarelli fired Lewis just one season into a four-year deal.
“I like Dave Lewis as a person,” Alberts said. “He was a good coach. He was just too comfortable with the players. Guys started taking advantage of that at some point. It was too buddy-buddy, ‘How you doing,’ joking around. Then when the coach is yelling at you, it doesn’t have the same effect.”
Chara finished his first Black-and-Gold season with 11 goals and 32 assists in 80 games. He logged 2,204:01 of ice time, most of any player in the league. It was a good reminder that Chara tried to do too much. That year, Chara never had supporting actors like Wade Redden, Chris Phillips, Anton Volchenkov, Andrej Meszaros or Brian Pothier, his former blue-line mates in Ottawa.
“That year was super humbling for him,” Alberts said. “Not to say he thought he could come in and change everything right away. But it might have been kind of a gut check to see it’s not quite as easy as you think it is given what he was surrounded with.”
Pieces put in place
On Jan. 15, 2007, the Bruins recalled Allen, 28 years old at the time, from Providence. The 1998 second-rounder had accumulated 336 games of AHL experience. Allen was running out of NHL time.
“One night in Buffalo, I’m a minus-3 after the first period,” Allen recalled. “Habscheid lit me up between periods. I deserved it. I was terrible that night. I finished the game off, and I remember thinking when we flew back to Boston that night, ‘I’m done. I’m gone. They’re sending me down. This is it. I can kiss the NHL goodbye. I’m never getting a chance again.’ ”
The next day, Allen reported early to Ristuccia Arena for practice. He got on the bike to clear his head.
Chara arrived at the rink. Once he saw Allen, the captain knew what he had to do. He sat down next to Allen, reminded him that bad games are going to happen and he needed to stay positive.
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“For someone in my position, literally fighting day in and day out to stay in the NHL, he didn’t have to do that. But that’s the type of guy he is,” Allen said. “From what I’ve heard, he’s only gotten better at that with age. He’s truly evolved from being that lead-by-example guy to somebody who can be vocal and be more of a fatherly figure to the younger guys. He’s only a couple years older than I am. But at that time, I felt, ‘This is a veteran in the NHL, a guy who’s played a million minutes and in big, big games.’ He’s taking the time to lift me up a little bit, a guy who spent the majority of his career in the minors. That was pretty cool.”
The 2006-07 season taught Chara that one player cannot initiate an immediate turnaround in the standings. But it was a critical season for the future champion to plant seeds of accountability, determination and belief. When they sprouted, an entire organization was ready to follow Chara onto the ice.
“He literally,” Alberts said, “made the culture of the Boston Bruins.”
(Top photo: Phillip MacCallum / Getty Images)
