By The Associated Press

BOSTON – On the day he was hired as the coach of the Boston Bruins, Robbie Ftorek said he knew that every day brought him one step closer to getting fired.

“He’s the guy who’s going to get rid of me eventually,” Ftorek said, casting a glance over the general manager Mike O’Connell. “You’re going to get released. It’s part of the job.”

Two years later, Ftorek was gone. And O’Connell, who cut Ftorek loose with nine games left in the 2003 regular season, got the same treatment on Saturday when team president Harry Sinden fired him with 11 games left in the year.

“When you think something has to be done, and you believe it has to be done and the consensus is that it has to be done, you have to do it,” Sinden said. “And Mike, in the some of the things he did when he was here, believed in the same principle.”

Under O’Connell, the Bruins went through four coaches in six years; he even took the bench himself after firing Ftorek. This year took on an even more desperate tone as the Bruins traded stars Joe Thornton and Sergei Samsonov in a push for the playoffs, only to fall short.

“It happens in the league,” Samsonov said in Vancouver after his Edmonton Oilers beat the Canucks 3-2 on Saturday night. “He made those calls, he was the GM at the time and that’s the business we play in. It seems like if you don’t perform, trades happen and sometimes it goes even higher.”

One of the NHL’s Original Six, the Bruins have not won the Stanley Cup since Bobby Orr led the team to titles in 1970 and 72. Boston has reached the finals five times since then during a record-setting string of 31 consecutive playoff appearances. But the franchise had an equally consistent run of letting its stars leave, from Orr to Ray Bourque to Thornton, whom O’Connell traded in November as a last-ditch effort to turn around the last-place club. Samsonov was sent to the Oilers this month.

Along with Sinden, O’Connell presided over a disastrous strategy heading into the NHL lockout that cost the league the entire 2004-05 season. The Bruins spent years purging their roster of all long-term deals in the hopes that they would be in position for a spending spree.

“This team, the way it’s set up with the rule changes, I think that we have to be considered one of the favorites for the Stanley Cup,” O’Connell said in August after signing captain Joe Thornton to a three-year contract.

But the new agreement with the players wasn’t the one the Bruins expected, and they didn’t come away with any advantage. O’Connell scrambled to fill up the roster but was unable to convince big names like Peter Forsberg and Mike Modano to sign up.

“That was the strategy we took and I’ll live with it. That’s the way it goes,” he said from his home in a telephone interview with The Associated Press shortly before the Bruins took the ice on Saturday night. “Whenever you don’t win in professional sports and you’re the general manager of the team, this is to be expected.”

The Bruins were 27-32-12 when O’Connell was fired; they are last in the Northeast Division, 13th in the Eastern Conference and nine points behind Montreal in the playoff race. In all, O’Connell’s teams went 207-203-71 and twice topped 100 points but never made it out of the first round of the playoffs.

Stars 3, Flames 2

DALLAS – Mike Modano set a franchise record for power-play goals, and Niko Kapanen added a short-handed goal to send the Dallas Stars to a 3-2 victory over Calgary.