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‘Nothing wrong’ with B’s coaching staff, says Marchand

Claude Julien, Brad Marchand

Claude Julien, Brad Marchand

AP

Boston forward Brad Marchand has given Claude Julien and his coaching staff a vote of confidence.

Well, sort of.

“There’s nothing wrong with our coaching staff,” Marchand told CSNNE. “That wasn’t the reason that we didn’t make the playoffs last year. We didn’t have guys pulling their weight.

“When you look at the system, it’s worked for a long time now.”

After the Bruins fired GM Peter Chiarelli in mid-April, many expected Julien to follow him out the door. Club president Cam Neely refused to give the veteran head coach a vote of confidence, only saying that Julien’s fate would be decided by the new GM -- which just so happened to be Chiarelli’s ex-assistant, Don Sweeney.

In early June, Sweeney made the call to bring back Julien for his ninth season behind the Bruins’ bench. But unlike Marchand’s remarks above, Sweeney wasn’t as enamored with the club’s system and playing style, suggesting changes needed to be made.

Julien agreed.

“Teams’ forechecking has changed a lot, so there are things we feel we can do with our transition game that we feel we can do a lot better with creating some speed,” he said this summer, per the Boston Herald. “We had already kind of addressed that and we’re going to introduce that into camp like we do every year.

“To me, those aren’t changes. Those are adjustments like we do every year.”

As for those adjustments, two major ones are on the horizon for this season -- defensemen moving up, and weak-side wing overloads, both in an effort to improve the breakout.

For more on that, read this insightful Boston Globe article.

And here’s the full Marchand-Torey Krug interview on CSNNE: