We present to you a new series explaining exactly why particular members of the Boston Bruins are the absolute worst, in no particular order:
So far in this series we've poked a little fun at people who are "the worst" but perhaps not really all that bad in the grand scheme of things. Hockey's one thing, but life is very much another, you might say. I'd agree. But then, there's Jeremy Jacobs.
The Bruins' owner is in every way an awful person who is actually the worst. This is easily demonstrable, not the least through his apparent campaign to keep a rich Florida town from being overrun by non-rich white people on occasion, but also by being the driving force between each of the last two NHL lockouts. Boston fans often — rather wrongly — criticize him for being a cheap old man who compares not-so-favorably to Charles Montgomery Burns, and in the former regard, they are absolutely wrong because the Bruins have always been a cap team and, before the cap was instituted, often stayed around the top-5 in the league in terms of payroll.
But he's exactly like Burns in that he will pursue his evil ends as far as humanly possible, as evidenced not only by the whole Florida fiasco but also the way in which he prosecutes the public-relations campaigns for the NHL Board of Governors. Take his bizarre and ridiculous (and rare) press conference just prior to the Bruins' first game of the season. Among the many ludicrous outright factually incorrect things he had to say during that media availability was that the offer the players signed in mid-January was not substantially different from the one the league offered before it was "forced" to start canceling games for the second time in eight years. His ability to act, with a straight face, as though he was not the bad guy in any of this was at once infuriating — for obvious reasons — but also astonishing because no one living or dead is a good enough actor to lie that blatantly without laughing through every line like Horatio Sanz in an SNL sketch gone bad.
Here's how detestable Jeremy Jacobs is: He finally saw the Bruins win a Stanley Cup in 2011, after years and years of trying and failing, and he still couldn't get even a conciliatory round of applause in Boston. It didn't help that, at the rally celebrating the win, he took a shot at Cam Neely not-winning one for no real reason other than you know he just couldn't resist. When Bruins fans think you're awful, you must be really and truly awful indeed.
This is a guy who by his own admission makes money hand over fist from owning the Bruins, and the concessions at TD Garden, and the concessions at a bunch of other NHL rinks and other places as well (including Boston's Logan Airport), who felt the need to put the NHL through two lockouts in less than a decade just to squeeze a little bit more money out of the players. And when the deal they basically forced the NHLPA to take went only-a-little sideways — because the owners weren't getting enough of the record $3.3 billion in hockey-related revenues, you see — they did it again. Then they tried to blame the players for all of it.
And here's the beauty of it: Jacobs is largely Teflon. Hockey fans don't hate him, the man who caused two lockouts. They hate Gary Bettman, the marionette who danced around at Jacobs' behest. Hockey fans, meanwhile, still give Jacobs their hard-earned money every single day. That's what makes this guy so particularly evil.
Actually, no. Jeremy Jacobs isn't evil. Evil is Jeremy Jacobs.