Chiarelli, Bruins deal wisely

For the new Bruins, this is only the beginning. This is not the end. This is not the time to trade away young talent from a team with a future that rose suddenly from a dark and barren horizon.

Now faced with the prospect of a Cup for the first time in 37 years, the Bruins acquired defenseman Steve Montador and forward Mark Recchi today for the stretch run of this NHL season. So they didn’t get Chris Pronger. So they didn’t get the Recchi of maybe 10 years ago. But what they got was better in the short term without getting worse in the long, which is precisely what they needed to do at this point in their rapid and ongoing development.

The Cup? You don’t win it in just one year. With any type of championship, you rarely do. Two years ago at this time, the Bruins were one of the worst teams in professional sports, short on both talent and discipline. A year ago at this time, we thought they were just short on talent. We held that belief right up to and through Game 6 of the first round of the playoffs, when the eighth-seeded B’s improbably forced a seventh game against the top-seeded Canadiens before being cleaned from the ice as if run over by a Zamboni.

Somewhere in there, the B’s rediscovered what they had for so long lacked.

Hope.

So really, what were they supposed to do now? Trade Phil Kessel? No, no, no. A thousand times no. The Bruins may or may not win the Cup this year, but there is now reason to believe that they will be Cup contenders for the foreseeable future. Kessel is just 21. David Krejci is 22. Milan Lucic is 20. Tuukka Rask is 21 and more promising than ever before, and Matt Hunwick is 23. The Bruins have a general manager with a long-term plan and a coach worthy of respect, and they a blend of youth and experience that every teams covets.

At the moment, Chiarelli deserves a tremendous amount of credit for staying the course. Bruins fans now have become like Red Sox fans of six years ago, anxious and desperate and impossible. Title deprivation can do that to a fandom. Chiarelli gave up former first-round pick Matt Lashoff (22d overall) in acquiring Recchi, though he also got a 2010 second-round pick in return. He really did not give up any of his guys, which is to say that the nucleus of the Bruins remains intact.

Think about it: Lashoff was drafted in 2005 and Chiarelli took over in 2006. That summer, between the draft and free agency, the Bruins added, among others, Zdeno Chara, Marc Savard, Lucic, and Kessel to the Boston organization. The last two came via the draft. Earlier this season, while the Bruins were catching the rest of the league by storm, Chiarelli all but made it clear that he had no intention of mortgaging the future.

"There's nothing magic about this," he told the Globe in early December. "You've got to go out and beat the bushes for the players, make sure people are on the same page internally and on the ice and grind it out. It's hard to do that Celtics-type trade [that brought Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to Boston in 2007 and revitalized the basketball franchise]. You can't do that in hockey."

So now here we are, on March 4 of the 2008-09 NHL season, and a funny thing has happened on the way to Opening Day at Fenway Park: Hockey is part of the spring curriculum again. The Bruins have struggled of late in the dead zone of every professional season -- those days just before the trading deadline, when the season's end remains just far enough away -- and Julien himself said he is eager to see how the team responds tomorrow night against the wretched Phoenix Coyotes. Now, with Recchi and Montador added to the roster, the Bruins may have even more reason to play.

As for the Cup, do not raise your expectations to unreasonable levels. The Bruins need to glide some before they can skate. Once postseason participants for 29 consecutive seasons -- during the last 24 of those, the Bruins failed to win a Cup -- the B’s have won just one playoff series in the last 13 full seasons. They have not won any series in the last eight. Anyone in any sport will tell you that the regular season and the postseason are two very different things, and we need look no further than the Bruins of 2003-04 to remember that lesson.

Know what the Bruins did after that disappointing finish? They fell into a tailspin -- in part due to misreading the labor situation -- that required three years to right, taking us through the dark ages of Mike O’Connell and Dave Lewis and Hannu Toivonen. Now the B’s have endured the night and rediscovered the brightness, regardless of whether the light is reflecting off Lord Stanley’s sacred cup.

Do the B’s want to win now? You bet they do. Can they? They certainly can. But to sacrifice too much now would have been terribly, terribly foolish, no matter how much time has passed since a hockey player other than Ray Bourque has inspired a celebration in the city of Boston.

At this point, after all, Peter Chiarelli and the Bruins have come much too far in the last year to do anything foolish.