Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs on the state of the franchise: ‘We measure success in Stanley Cups’ - The Boston Globe (2024)

It’s only when the topic turns to the Bruins that his voice turns to vinegar.

“That doesn’t matter to us; it doesn’t matter,” said Jacobs after ticking off a few regular-season accomplishments of the team over the years. “We measure success in Stanley Cups. For us, it’s the Stanley Cup, and you’ve got to put your chips in when the time comes to go for it. We have [salary] cap restraints that we try to manage around to bring the best roster we possibly can and put together for our run.”

The Bruins have won exactly one Stanley Cup since Jacobs’s father, Jeremy, bought the team, the old Boston Garden, and a 2.3-acre West End parcel for $10 million 49 years ago.

Going by Charlie Jacobs’s silver chalice standards, a rate of one championship per half-century, even with six losses in the Finals, is not successful.

Going by the $1.9 billion valuation by Forbes of the Bruins, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on constructing and renovating TD Garden, and the $1.2 billion spent to codevelop the mixed-use Hub on Causeway project, the Jacobs family’s investment has succeeded.

That the Jacobs’s arena tenant, the Celtics, kept Delaware North properties humming during the team’s NBA championship run this month was a salve for the bottom line but a bruise to a hockey franchise’s ego.

Jacobs, 52, spoke after the Bruins’ seven-game opening-round series against the Maple Leafs, before they got bounced by the Panthers in the second round, and weeks before his poker-faced presence in the season’s joyless postmortem.

Watching the Bruins blow a 3-1 series lead in Round 1 and play a Game 7 was an unwelcome distraction.

“To say I was nervous or anxious would be an understatement,” said Jacobs. “I had a pit in my stomach. Part of me was angry that we were even at Game 7 when we shouldn’t have been. Truly, if the team had shown up before, we wouldn’t have been at a Game 7.

“I remember thinking, ‘You know what, if we lose this game, we got what we deserved because we took those other games for granted.’ Which I’m not sure they did — that was me telling my own narrative in my head. I’m not sure they did. I just feel they did. But we won.”

Had the Bruins lost, Jacobs was planning a press conference.

“You could take it wherever you wish,” said Jacobs, who made it a point to compliment the very top of the hockey operations department — he singled out president Cam Neely, general manager Don Sweeney, and assistant general manager Evan Gold — for their work ethic and the current roster mix of young and veteran talent.

Salary caps and CBAs

The team’s CEO and alternate governor watches every Bruins road game “avidly,” he said, and attends morning skates when they’re at TD Garden.

For home games, he tries to end meetings by 3 p.m. to have time to exercise before returning to the Garden for dinner and to watch the game from his suite.

He has friends and family there, but said “it’s tough to watch it with people that are asking you questions or are sending texts or interested in other things besides the game, for me at least. Even my kids, I’m like, ‘Guys, can you put your phones down and let’s watch the game?’ ”

Jacobs keeps a stack of GM organizers with details on every player contract on his desk. Thumbing through one, he points out with disdain how player agents sometimes negotiate to have the bulk of signing bonuses payable on years when collective bargaining agreements expire, to ensure payment in the event of a work stoppage, rather than spread out more evenly.

“We’re seeing more and more of that happen as a way for people to circumvent the salary cap,” said Jacobs.

The NHL’s current labor agreement expires in 2026, and former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is now the president of the NHL Players Association.

“Personally, I consider Marty Walsh a friend — I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the National Hockey League, either,” said Jacobs, pointing out that the office tower and the rest of Hub on Causeway doesn’t happen without the assistance of Walsh and former Governor Charlie Baker.

Jacobs finds Walsh far more preferable than past NHLPA leadership, describing him as “reasonable,” someone who “doesn’t suffer the bureaucratic b.s. that we see now.”

Jacobs is the youngest of six siblings. He and his two brothers, Jerry and Lou, share chief executive officer titles at Delaware North, as well as alternate governor status for the Bruins.

After what Jacobs describes as the “dark days” of the pandemic — a time when the tourism- and hospitality-based properties were essentially shuttered and the family endured death threats — he and his brothers went about justifying each new expense as they rehired employees who had been laid off.

“We brought them back with tweezers,” said Jacobs “and cut all the fat out of what was a 100-plus-year-old business and rebuilt it.”

Adding a team to the portfolio?

Delaware North revenue last year was at $4.3 billion, a high that topped 2022′s record, with top-line revenue expected to be around $4.5 billion this year, said Jacobs.

Included in the Bruins’ portfolio is 20 percent of NESN, the rare example of a regional sports network that’s succeeding when other leading RSNs across hockey, baseball, and basketball are facing bankruptcy.

The other 80 percent of NESN is owned by Fenway Sports Group, which owns several sports teams, including the Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Penguins, whose TV broadcasts are managed by NESN.

Jacobs said he and his brothers own a small interest in Major League Soccer’s Minnesota United FC.

Asked if the family would like to buy another sports team, Jacobs said, “I’d love to. I don’t have a target in mind and I would be very cautious about saying anything at this moment in time about what might be on the horizon. But yeah, of course, of course.”

There is not a whole lot more space left to develop, but Jacobs mentioned a hypothetical “small project” of adding parking spaces above the North Station train tracks that would allow entrance into high-end “bunker suites” nearer to the TD Garden parquet and ice.

And there’s a public ice rink the Jacobs family is working on as a legacy project on Pier One in East Boston.

Wu said she has appreciated insights from Jacobs around functionality and how to gauge the pulse of the city from the family’s up-close presence at an entertainment, business, and transportation hub.

“He’s incredibly thoughtful, and has an expansive view of how all the pieces fit together,” she said.

Jeremy Jacobs is 84 and still leads Monday morning Zoom calls where the leadership team reviews operations of the entire Delaware North enterprise.

Charlie Jacobs and his brothers still go to their father — whom they refer to affectionately as “The Chairman” — for the final say-so on major decisions.

When it comes to the Bruins, Charlie Jacobs oversees and empowers Neely and Sweeney to make team decisions, with Charlie and Jeremy Jacobs consulted on major calls related to contracts, trades, and coaching changes.

Jeremy Jacobs sold his team shares to his six children five years ago but retains veto power.

“At the end of the day, if he calls and says, ‘Do something,’ I’m doing it, because he’s still the boss,” said Jacobs.

That said, Jeremy Jacobs’s workdays have become shorter the past couple of years, with the sons assuming the bulk of day-to-day responsibilities.

“People age differently,” said Jacobs. “My mom and my dad, I’m going to say, are feeling their age, which sucks, but you know, he wants to be there, to be in the office, to be part of the action.”

Jacobs married his second wife, Liz, last January at a resort in the Matterhorn area of the Swiss Alps. By his first wife, he has three children: 23-year-old twins Katie and Charlie, and 21-year-old William.

After moving to Boston from California in 2001, the Jacobs family moved to Weston two years later and raised their children there. Jacobs moved back to Boston, to Downtown Crossing, six years ago.

He spends a good deal of his off-time on his horse farm, CMJ Sporthorse, in Lexington, Ky. He and his siblings grew up in Buffalo jumping horses on their parents’ farm there and then later in the West Palm Beach Fla., area.

Competing for the United States, he was one of four riders who won a major show jumping tournament, the 2017 Nations Cup. He still rides competitively, though he says, “I’m too old to be doing this stuff; a lot of people have been trying to tell me that.”

A close-up of Cassinja S, the horse he rode in 2017, serves as the screen saver on his phone, and framed photos in his office show Jacobs, in full equestrian attire with helmet, tailored jacket, breeches, and boots, astride his horses in midjump.

“I get way more nervous before a Bruins or hockey game than I do jumping,” said Jacobs.

Stigma is hard to shake

A miniature bronze replica of the larger-than-life statue of Bobby Orr midflight that hovers over the Causeway Street concourse stands in the corner of his office.

As everyone knows, the Orr moment came from the 1970 Stanley Cup Finals — one of the Bruins’ five pre-Jacobs family Stanley Cup championships.

The imbalance has created a gap with the fans Jacobs has been unable to bridge.

Jacobs said that if he were to step out on center ice at TD Garden, “people would for sure boo” or to turn on sports radio. “I’m sure they’d say something nasty.”

That’s because “for a long time we were seen as out-of-town disconnected owners that weren’t involved in the Boston community — I’ve literally had people say the ‘carpetbagging Jacobses,’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. I’ve had three kids that went through the Boston [area] school system, I’ve been here for 20-something years.’

“But, as Bostonians do, it takes a while to change perception. I’m involved in the community. I’m so proud of what we’ve done with our youth hockey programs, the Bruins Foundation.”

He has come to rationalize the reaction to his family as serving “that narrative to say they’re not interested. Whatever. You can’t control that. You’ve just got to go on and do what you believe in. You can’t get stuck in that.”

Glen Thornborough, president of TD Garden and chief operating officer of the Bruins, said that after the Bruins won Game 7 against the Maple Leafs in overtime, Jacobs sent him a video of the party atmosphere as fans spilled out onto Causeway Street where Jacobs was greeting them and exchanging high-fives.

“He wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to the team,” said Thornborough.

Both Jacobs and Bruins fans await the day when that heart can become whole.

Michael Silverman can be reached at michael.silverman@globe.com.