The Bruins organization was a "moribund franchise" just a few years ago, but the club has "resurrected and reshaped as a perennial championship-contending heavyweight," according to Kevin Paul Dupont of the BOSTON GLOBE. The key to the turnaround has been "a successful concoction" of Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli, President Cam Neely and coach Claude Julien, a "somewhat eclectic bunch brought together in a span of less than 18 months following club owner Jeremy Jacobs’s decision in 2006 to broom out his old management guard." Neely is "head of concept and vision, charged with identifying, restoring, and helping to maintain the franchise’s image, culture, and ethos on both the playing and business sides of the operation." Chiarelli is the "chief hockey integrator, managing both up and down the organization, empowered, he says, with autonomy to make all player moves he and his group deem necessary." Chiarelli said it is a management team that has grown "organically." He added that there have "routinely been differences of opinion throughout the organization ... but nothing yet that has impeded a steadily-improved trajectory leading to two visits to the Stanley Cup Final the last three seasons." Neely said that those disagreements "have been few and relatively easy to settle." Dupont notes what became "abundantly clear in lengthy interviews with Julien and Neely is that Chiarelli ... works through decisions deliberately and methodically." Chiarelli: "You make a major organizational decision like [a major trade], you have to talk to your owner and talk with your president, and let them know what you are doing and why you are doing it. So that’s a decision, while I have the autonomy to recommend and make that decision, it would be negligent of me and anyone else sitting in my chair not to apprise and get counsel from everyone, whether it’s a board, a board and owner, a president" (BOSTON GLOBE, 10/1).
