Tyler Seguin flourishing in Dallas & why Bruins traded him
by Joe Haggery, Bruins insider
There will be plenty of vociferous critics of the Tyler Seguin trade to Dallas if the 21-year-old ends up lighting the lamp a couple of times against his former NHL team in Boston.
There are already more than a few dissenting voices out there after watching the skilled forward pile up six goals and 15 points in 14 games upon moving back to his natural center position with the Dallas Stars. But the common mistake made by many of those hindsight captains is that they buy the notion that the talented, immature Seguin was going to do any of those things while in Boston.
There were very real questions about the youngster’s ability to ever thrive as a core, 20-minute member of Claude Julien’s system that rewards attention paid to detail and competing for every one-on-one puck battle. The little things are every bit as important as the big ticket items to the Boston Bruins, and Seguin was always more of a big-picture kind of prospect.
There was every belief among B’s management Seguin would quickly turn into a 30-goal, 90-point type guy for a forever .500 team like the Stars. But with the points also comes a flawed player that’s barely in positive plus/minus who “wins” 37 percent of his face-offs.
The Bruins saw all they needed to see when Seguin soiled himself in his first two shifts at the Bell Centre while getting a chance to play center last season while Patrice Bergeron was down with a concussion.
Seguin is a flashy offensive producer with skating speed the Bruins are sorely lacking right now, but he was also the player Bruins management was the least loathe to lose when difficult offseason decisions needed to be made.
“We fully expected that Seguin would be a really good player in Dallas, and that’s what he’s doing right now,” said Peter Chiarelli, who clearly knew he’d be taking some heat this summer with Stanley Cup mainstays like Seguin, Rich Peverley, Nathan Horton and Andrew Ference all leaving the Bruins last offseason.
“Given the salary cap and the desire to keep other core players, there were moves we absolutely had to make this summer. You have to look at what we got back in return. Loui Eriksson is going to be a really good fit for us here, and Reilly Smith showed he’s got a high ceiling during training camp.
“It might be a couple of years for Joe Morrow to develop, but we believe he’s going to be a top-four defenseman in the NHL. Matt Fraser gave us some organizational depth along the wing.”
One thing the Bruins didn’t get: Alex Chiasson, the former BU hockey product they were pushing to receive from Dallas during trade talks before settling on Fraser.
The bottom line: As good as Seguin has been in Dallas, the belief is that certain things would always hold him back in Boston. He wasn’t diligent enough to win board battles as a winger, an area that’s hugely important to any Julien-coached team, and Seguin's hockey IQ wasn’t high enough to function as a multi-tasking center at both ends of the ice.
Julien answered a general question in recent days about junior players learning NHL battle levels, and it sounded like some of the Seguin experience was sprinkled into the B’s coach’s answer.
“It’s very common because, first of all, they’re dealing with stronger individuals. You hear a million times that they’re not dealing with men at this level rather than with 16-year-olds at the junior level,” said Julien. “Another problem is that they’re such good players, they can get away with things at their [junior] level that they won’t get away with here.
“Sometimes it can be a benefit for those guys confidence-wise, but then it can be a challenge to make the [NHL] jump when their skill and talent alone won’t get them through.
“Then you have to teach. But we’re okay with that, and we expect it though as long as they’re not stubborn, and open-minded enough to understand they’ve got things they need to improve on. Most guys are like that. But you do get the odd player that thinks they’re good enough to play the way they have their whole life. That’s when it becomes a challenge.”
Clearly there were enough reasons on the ice to deal Seguin, but they went far beyond his stat sheet.
The Bruins brushed off an incident years ago when Seguin came to the team nervous about a female threatening to release embarrassing pictures of the B’s winger if she wasn’t paid a hefty sum of money. Too much money and too much fame in a teenager’s life can result in those kinds of situations.
But those kinds of blips popped up all over Boston’s radar screen in Seguin’s final season with the team, a timeline of Seguin debacles that occurred after he signed a guaranteed six-year contract with the Bruins which would pay him $5.75 million per season.
He wasn’t yet making that big money in his final entry-level year with the Bruins, but his off-ice lifestyle took a turn for the worse once he knew his money was guaranteed.
His first couple of seasons in Boston, Seguin hung around with his Bruins teammates, most famously Brad Marchand, or a group of friends on the BU hockey team, including Chiasson and Minnesota Wild forward Charlie Coyle.
That changed toward the end of Seguin’s sophomore season, and by last season, a group of Seguin’s buddies moved down from Toronto and made themselves a fixture in the young Bruins superstar’s life.
Seguin’s Bruins teammates tried to steer the young forward away from his new entourage, whose members didn’t have the same responsibilities as an NHL player, and were doing a little more than just going out for a couple of beers on Friday nights.
But Seguin wouldn’t listen to the team, or his teammates who had walked down similar roads in their early twenties.
“We all tried to talk to him about it,” said one current Bruins player. “He thought these guys were his support system, but in reality they were bringing him down. You’ve really got to be smart about which are your real friends once you start making a little bit of money.”
The final straw was the Bruins’ suspicion Seguin was staying out late in his native Toronto during the first round of the playoffs. A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed the Bruins did indeed need a guard outside his hotel room to make certain he was obeying the team’s playoff curfew, a report that first appeared in the Boston Herald and was denied by Seguin’s mother.
Say what you will about Chicago star Pat Kane’s hijinks with the Blackhawks, but there were never any stories of misbehavior during Chicago’s playoff runs. Once a player is off the reservation during a postseason run for a Stanley Cup-caliber team, it’s a pretty short trip to being shipped out of town.
Seguin turned it around by the time the team faced Chicago in the Cup Finals, but it was way too late by then.
All of that stuff led to Seguin’s head-scratching comments in his first Dallas press conference lamenting that he was “the only single guy" on the Bruins, and his parents' very clumsy attempts to circle the wagons for a 21-year-old adult. It seems as if the wakeup call of getting traded from Boston has reconnected Seguin with his bearings on and off the ice. It was perhaps the kind of life-altering event that was going to shake him out of the world he’d created for himself.
“We worked with him a bit this summer, and he’s been nothing but good for us,” said Mark Recchi, Seguin’s former B’s teammates and a Special Assistant to the GM for the Dallas Stars. “He’s been joined at the hip with Jamie Benn since the season started, and obviously he’s been producing quite a bit for us on the ice. Jamie is a young, single guy that Segs can go out to dinner with on off nights, but he’s also a guy that’s really got a good head on his shoulders when it comes to being a good pro.”
That was the lament in Boston: Seguin wasn’t professional enough in a league that demands it, especially in a social media age where there aren’t that many secrets anymore.
The Bruins attempted to use ordinary hockey discipline when they suspended Seguin on the road in Winnipeg for missing a morning team meeting. That issue was compounded when his teammates were forced to cover up for Seguin when the youngster concocted a lame, nonsensical fib about the time-zone change on his cellphone causing him to oversleep.
The Bruins clearly felt like things were manageable at that point in the middle of Seguin’s second season while he was en route to becoming an All-Star. But that upward trajectory didn’t last into his final year in Boston.
Seguin's regression on and off the ice in his third and final season with the Black and Gold, as much as anything else, is what led Boston to make the difficult decision to let him move on.
The Bruins into a homecoming showdown with Seguin and his Stars on Tuesday night at TD Garden.
Seguin flourishing in Dallas & why Bruins traded him