Report: Bruins to name Cam Neely team president

Boston Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli, right, talks with vice president Cam Neely, left, as they watch the team during hockey practice in Wilmington, Mass., Wednesday, April 15, 2009. The Bruins face the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the NHL playoffs on Thursday.(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

AP

Ahh the fun of the off-season when team releases like this one from the Bruins can cause a stir amongst the Internet denizens.

The Boston Bruins will make a major announcement during a press conference on Wednesday, June 16 at 2 p.m. in the Gray Walls Area at the TD Garden. Present for the press conference will be: Boston Bruins Owner Jeremy Jacobs, Principal Charlie Jacobs, Senior Advisor to the Owner Harry Sinden, General Manager Peter Chiarelli and Vice President Cam Neely.

Those are a lot of big guns to break out for a press conference when neither an NHL award has been handed out nor NHL free agency season has begun. Even more interesting is that head coach Claude Julien isn’t listed as attending. Time to fire up the rumor mill and start philosophizing about who the Bruins will hire as a new coach, right? Thankfully, CSN New England’s Joe Haggerty is there to find out what the heck is going on for us.

Knee-jerk reactionaries might have thought something was amiss with the Bruins given [Claude Julien’s] absence from the announcement and the way the B’s playoff run ended.

But as knee-jerk reactionaries normally are, they’d be dead wrong. The B’s “major announcement” is instead that Cam Neely will be Team President of the Boston Bruins, according to a hockey source that confirmed it with CSNNE.com Tuesday afternoon.

So much for a sudden head coach search. Moving Neely into an even bigger front office position and considering there were already three other vice presidents on the Bruins staff, moving someone into the top office makes a world of sense. That said, I hope the Bruins had some fun in notifying Neely by writing something on the office bathroom wall, stealing a scene right out of Neely’s historic role as “Sea Bass” in the film Dumb & Dumber.