It feels like the Boston Bruins have been firing Claude Julien forever.

And the thing is, at this point, it’s really a case of either [poop] or get off the pot, because this is getting ridiculous.

You want to read the “It would be a mistake to fire Claude Julien” takes, you can do it anywhere. Here’s one from Pete Blackburn. Here’s another from Travis Yost. And if Fluto Shinzawa is saying it, you know it’s the right take to have.

The reasons why you don’t fire Claude Julien are self-evident: The Bruins are the best possession team in the league. The Bruins have one of the lowest team shooting percentages in the league. Some of the team’s best players are having not-great seasons. The Bruins have serious roster problems that get worse the deeper down the lineup you get. The Bruins haven’t drafted particularly well in recent years.

This doesn’t need re-explaining.

And yet everyone is just kinda sitting around saying, “It’s gonna happen soon.”

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Again, we’ve been saying that for a while — what, since before Peter Chiarelli got canned? — but now it really and truly feels like this is the big one. The Bruins are higher in the standings right now than they have any right to be based on the quality of the roster with which they entered the season, sitting second in the division albeit with about a thousand more games played than everyone. But the thing is those are banked points and it’s not like the teams behind them are world-beaters (maturing Toronto aside).

The Bruins’ path to the playoffs this year always seemed as though it was going to boil down to punching above their weight (i.e. PDOing their way into a wild card position or, maybe, third in the Atlantic). Seems likely that they’d mostly have been able to tread water, staying competitive but ultimately falling short in the end. And that’s when Julien would finally get fired.

But because the Julien has them playing a new, faster style better suited to masking some of their very obvious deficiencies, they’re just a really good team that’s where it is despite some of the worst luck in the league.

Sweeney doesn’t want to accept the “bad luck” argument, especially because they’ve been outscored 10-5 in the last two games, against the Islanders and Red Wings, two teams that are very definitively terrible. The implication here, that somehow a stern talking to caused the team to start shooting more effectively after being called out by their GM, is of course nonsense, especially because it used a three-game sample as proof that something had been figured out. But if Sweeney’s now complaining about “We don’t hit the net enough on our shot attempts so the CF% doesn’t matter and they’re gonna have a bad shooting percentage all year,” well, that scans as looking really intensely at the relatively small dark cloud and not its obvious, mathematically supported silver lining.

It seems to me that Sweeney — a Barney Fife analog insofar as he seems to have gotten where he is despite bumbling around at nearly every turn just because everyone likes him — really wants to have a lot of evidence to point to when he finally pulls that one “Fire The Coach” bullet out of his breast pocket and fires it in desperation. He literally told Shinzawa less than two weeks ago that he’s keeping those options open, and specifically identified the power play as an issue. Since that initial conversation, the Bruins have gone 4 of 19 on the power play (21.1 percent), after starting the year 22 of 129 (17.1 percent). Small sample, but it’s better, so now the goalposts are moved.

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“You’d like to think everything will regress back to the mean and bear out,” Sweeney told Shinzawa a few weeks ago. “You stick with that process and the conviction of that process. We do have a lot of things people would point to and say, ‘Would this would be a dangerous team if they got hot in terms of a playoff environment, because they have structure?’ Yes. But the bottom line is if you don’t get in, it doesn’t matter. You have to find a way.”

So now the issue is the accuracy of the Bruins’ many shot attempts — and hey, they take more per 60 than any team in the league at 5-on-5 — except that, of course, they put more than half those attempts on net. They’re actually 13th in the league in terms of percentage of 5-on-5 shot attempts that end up on net. There is a 1.5 percent correlation between the percentage of your shots you get on goal and your shooting percentage, which is effectively non-existent. And even if it were meaningful, the Bruins are still in the top half of the league at it, so they’d theoretically be fine.

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