Report: Boston Bruins GM Accused of Threatening Players Before Trades

"Don told the core back in November and again before the Four Nations: 'If you don't get this together, changes are coming for you!' and clearly he held true to his word,» a source close to the situation told RG recently.

"They all knew this was coming if they didn't start winning more and find consistency. He made it clear that he would do something exactly like this. He met with the leadership core and coaching staff after they fired 'Monty' [Jim Montgomery] and again right before the break."

"I think you could kind of see the way things were going. Anytime you don't achieve what you're expected to or what you set out to do, they're going to make changes.

I mean, ultimately, changes come when you're doing well too, but whether you're going to add or subtract, changes need to be made.

Unfortunately, when it's not going the way you want it to, the changes are going to be bigger. So, yeah, I think we saw the potential for the changes that were going to come.

We talked about it; we tried to stop it, and we just couldn't. It just seemed like every time we tried to do the right things and change course, it wouldn't come together for us.

Unfortunately, sometimes things like that happen, and you try to control it, you try to do whatever you can, and it just seems like everything that could go against us would go against us. You feel like you're trying to do the right thing, and everything that could go wrong at that moment goes wrong.

So when that happens, you try to make changes because if you don't, you could potentially go down that path two years in a row, and that's a bigger problem. So, yeah, we knew there was a potential for this to happen, and unfortunately, it did."