Boston Bruins: Zdeno Chara Injured; Joe Morrow Praised
The Boston Bruins are starting to lose players to injury at an alarming rate. What started off as a young player in Seth Griffith losing his opportunity to start the season with Boston turned into something much scarier for the Bruins. Both Dennis Seidenberg and Zdeno Chara, the top two defensemen on the roster, are injured.
The Seidenberg issue is more concrete at this point, with the back surgery sidelining him for roughly eight weeks. Chara’s injury is still new and details aren’t known as of yet with the exception of the fact that it’s an upper-body injury. Even if Chara does come back from this injury to start the season, this should be a wake-up call to everyone in the Bruins organization that the Bruins are in deep need of more established NHL defensemen on the roster. Injuries are apparent to every team, and the Bruins dealt with them a lot last season. The Bruins could look to trade more for more established players, or sign a player from a very depleted free agent market.
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As it stands, Claude Julien is working with what he has and seems to be working a lot of the younger, and newer players out to see who is deserving of a roster spot. Joe Morrow, Colin Miller and Matt Irwin all had more than 26 minutes of ice-time in Thursday’s 4-3 shootout win over the Rangers. All three players played well, but Julien had high praise for Joe Morrow, who already projected to be getting a look at a potential roster spot before both the injuries to Seidenberg and Chara occured. “If you ask me for a rating, (Morrow) got a real good rating (Thursday),” Julien said. “Especially when you’re down to five D’s, and the amount of ice time those guys had to get. … That includes a young guy in Carlo, trying to get his feet wet in the league, and right from the get-go, you’re down to five. So, I thought those guys handled themselves well, but Joe was really good in my mind.”
Joe Morrow appears to be ready to play a top-four role, and with the injuries that the Bruins are currently dealing with, the “top-four” could really get skewed, especially when looking at the current bodies on the Bruins roster. Based purely off of healthy defenseman in the Bruins system right now who are fighting for an NHL roster spot, the back-end could project to look like this:
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Joe Morrow – Zach Trotman
Matt Irwin – Colin Miller
Needless to say, the roster looks choppy and thrown-together at best, and while the pairings may or may not be accurate, any pairing of these players is clearly lacking elite, NHL-ready bodies. The only truly established NHLers on this list are Krug, McQuaid, Irwin, and Kevan Miller. Krug and McQuaid have chemistry playing together, and while it’s tough to play Krug against some of the more established talent in the NHL the way Chara would be deployed, McQuaid is the best defensive-minded player of the group. Zach Trotman could grow into a role as a legitimate top-four, or even top-two defenseman alongside Zdeno Chara, but his resume is still too short to list him there with confidence quite yet.
Follow Brandon Share-Cohen on Twitter @BShareCohen to discuss all things Bruins and sports
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