Look, I get it.

The Bruins missed the playoffs, and based on team CEO Charlie Jacobs's threats earlier this season, someone had to pay the price. Peter Chiarelli put together the team, so it was him. Claude Julien also coached the team, and so when the new GM is hired, it might be him as well.

And it probably will be.

Because what the team's failure this season — the first in eight years without playoffs in Boston — really did was allow team president Cam Neely to seize just a little more power for himself. And he did it ruthlessly.

Recall: He was hired as vice president of the Bruins prior to the 2007-08 season, and promoted to his current role in 2010. That's a full season after Chiarelli took over (he came to Boston just before the draft in 2006) and a few months after Julien was hired (June 2007). For Neely, these guys were never “his guys,” even though they won the Cup four years later, and did so with a team largely built on the ideals of capital-B capital-H Bruins Hockey. They were physical and gritty and skilled and responsible all at the same time, in much the same way the Bruins of Neely's early 90s were. And the Boston tendency to fetishize these virtues across all aspects of sport and life really took root for Chiarelli.

Thus the ludicrously generous contracts to guys like Chris Kelly and Dennis Seidenberg and Gregory Campbell and Dan Paille and Kevan Miller and Adam McQuaid; not good players, to be sure, but guys who embody what Bruins Hockey is all about. Thus the undeserved cult hero status bestowed upon unimpeachable power forward Milan Lucic. And obviously, thus the Tyler Seguin trade, which came because he wasn't Bruins Hockey enough. Informed speculation is that the fallout from that disastrous swap — i.e. getting four nickels back for a quarter and calling it good, to the detriment of the team's offense that, wow, who could have guessed, now looks to have been incredibly short-sighted — played a role in Chiarelli's ouster. At least insofar as it provided Neely with an excuse, even if the kind of playing philosophy he espoused (and still espouses) was at the heart of the deal, and even if he, as team president, was in the room for the decision and likely had to sign off on it.

(And please, spare us the Bruins-peddled perspective that Seguin was “never going to score with the Bruins,” too, because Seguin had 99 points in 129 games getting middle-of-the-lineup minutes over his final two years in Boston. This is well-trodden ground at this point, but the main reason the Bruins saw fit to trade Seguin was that he rather unluckily scored one goal on 70 shots in a Cup run that failed because Zdeno Chara was injured, the fourth line got way more minutes than it should have, and Chicago had a truly amazing team. The partying was just an excuse for the team and local media to shiv Seguin before throwing him overboard; Party Boy Brad Marchand didn't suffer nearly as many slings and arrows, mainly because that 2011 team ended up being “champians.”)

Put another way, Chiarelli mismanaged the cap — on purpose for the 2013-14 season, mind you — and simultaneously tore down part of what made those Bruins teams of 2011 and 2013 so dangerous: If your club features Tyler Seguin on the third line, you are deep to a ludicrous extent. Now, this is the hockey equivalent of a first-world problem (“We have so many good players we can't pay them all!”) and that was understood in Boston. But missing the playoffs with a cap-limit team was always going to be unacceptable, even if it was foreseeable for all the reasons listed above.

But what got Chiarelli fired, beyond the dealings with the cap and not squeaking into the eighth seed through 82 games, is that he tried to move away from Bruins Hockey. Guys who are objectively bad were being forced out of the lineup in favor of players who might actually make a positive difference on the ice — remember Julien complaining that he had to use Ryan Spooner, who ended up forming a potent trio with Lucic and David Pastrnak, instead of people he wanted to dress? — and his big acquisition at the trade deadline was skilled, speedy forward Brett Connolly. He told Campbell and Paille they would not be asked back. And Shawn Thornton deservedly got the same treatment last year. That's not Bruins Hockey, but it's the NHL Hockey predicated on speed and goalscoring that's evolved in the years since Boston won the cup.

Story continues