Boston Bruins fans might not be happy that some of the faces in the front office haven't changed over the past couple of years, but it seems like that group has finally gotten back down to business with the hiring of Marco Sturm as their new head coach. Through the first week few weeks of training camp, the team looks like a much more disciplined and hard-working version.
It isn't that you can't appreciate what the likes of Bruce Cassidy, Jim Montgomery, and (in his assistant role) Joe Sacco had done for the Bruins' organization. Cassidy led them within a game of another Stanley Cup, Montgomery was behind the bench of the greatest regular season in NHL history, and Sacco stood alongside both on those journeys.
The most questionable part of both of those head coaching tenures was the way it ended. It seemed like the players got sick of the messaging and started to tune out both coaches. When the coaches tried to be the bad guys, the players didn't like it, and before you knew it, they were packing up their offices.
It's possible that Sturm's messaging will wear itself out, as well. In that case, it might be time to look deeper at the players in the room, although it's possible the problems are now all gone. It seems that way, as the Bruins already look like a more cohesive and disciplined group as Sturm tries to bring it back to basics and re-instill the culture that made the organization great.
The free-flowing styles of Cassidy and Montgomery made for some interesting hockey, but there's a reason why Claude Julien led his team to the 2011 Stanley Cup and the 2019 and 2023 teams couldn't get over the hump. The Julien team wasn't the most talented on paper, but the system he ran was foolproof.
Watch back the footage of the Bruins' game against the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday. You'll see that the players are buying into Sturm's version of that system, as the 1-2-2 the team was falling into in the neutral zone, and the positioning in the defensive zone, was the most structured we've seen this group in years.
We still have a way to go before the Bruins show it in the regular season. If this Bruins roster played under Montgomery or Cassidy, there's a good chance it'd get very ugly. However, with the Sturm-led structure we've seen in the preseason, maybe, just maybe, he can get this group to overperform like his old coach, Julien.