Boston Bruins: Take Long View at Trade Deadline

Boston Bruins: Take Long View at Trade Deadline

While the Boston Bruins have surprised many by competing for a playoff spot and seem to be heading in the right direction, barring a Beantown version of the Miracle on Ice they don’t seem quite ready to make a serious run for the Stanley Cup.

With 57 points in 49 games, they are on a similar pace as last year (when they missed the playoffs by two points). They currently stand in the 6^th playoff spot of the Eastern Conference, but are precariously only 1-3 points ahead of the 7^th to 10^th place teams. They have struggled at home and been excellent on the road – the opposite of last year – but have improved in other areas like the shootout (3-1 after going 4-10 last season), powerplay (ranked 2^nd after finishing 18^th last year) and penalty kill (ranked 5^th after finishing 12^th).

That’s a lot to be happy about for a team that went through both a major offseason roster revamp and strategy change to adapt to fast-moving NHL trends by emphasizing more pace and speed from the defense to the forwards in pushing the puck up ice and pressuring teams further.

“I think we’ve surprised a lot of people,” Torey Krug told CSNNE. “We’re not surprised with where we are. We’ve left some points on the table in certain games throughout the season, but at the end of the year we don’t want to look back and regret some of these games. We’re going to take it game by game in the second half, and see where it goes.”

Young, fast and skilled players like Ryan Spooner (3^rd on the B’s and tied for 36^th in league scoring with 37 points) have emerged to make big impacts. “I think at the beginning of the year, there were a lot of people that probably thought that we wouldn’t be in the playoffs. We kind of heard that kind of stuff, that we would be a younger team,” Spooner added. “But I think we’ve shown that we can play with the top teams. I think that we’ve proved a lot of people wrong, and we just have to keep that up. Consistency [is the biggest thing]. We go on some stretches where we win five or six in a row, and then we lose three or four. We definitely need to change that. Our games at home, they haven’t been great. The last little bit they’ve been a little bit better, but as a whole that definitely needs to improve.”

Getting thrashed by the Ducks 6-2 right before the All-Star break, the B’s received a strong reminder just how far they have to go. “We’re still a young hockey club and there are a lot of guys that realized tonight that when you play against a heavy team, you got to be ready to play,” Bruins Coach Claude Julien told CSNNE. “We did in spurts but there were other times that we weren’t there. We chalk those up to trying to get better as a team. We have to have good execution, good pace and speed to our game. When we did that, we were able to certainly take some of the game to them.”

There will be natural growing pains with a young and improving team, but overall the B’s new approach to speed up their game is progressing.

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Trade Deadline Window

Further, as the February 29 trade deadline approaches the B’s should take a long-term view of the club’s needs and continue to build a contender that seriously competes alongside the NHL’s elites for several years to come. They have go-to veterans Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci and Brad Marchand along with young players Spooner, David Pastrnak, Colin Miller and Krug to build around, and heart and soul ‘true Bruin’ workhorses like Matt Beleskey and Adam McQuaid who always lay it all out to win.

Additionally they have a solid group of promising defensive prospects including Jakub Zboril, Brandon Carlo, Jeremy Lauzon and Matt Grzelcyk, and offensive youngsters on the way like Zach Senyshyn, Jake DeBrusk and Austin Czarnik.

The Bruins should continue the process of getting younger, more skilled and faster, beginning with trading Loui Ericksson (who turns 31 in July) and potentially both Zdeno Chara (39 in March) and Dennis Seidenberg (35 in July) while the window is still open. The three have a combined cap hit of over $15 million, which will likely rise to about $17 million if the B’s resign Ericksson who will be an unrestricted free agent after the season. They have depth on the bench and in Providence that can help cover these losses, at least short-term.

Eriksson is a decent two-way player and pretty good in front of the net on the powerplay, but not a gamebreaking star with the elite speed, skill or finish to make any hefty new deal worth it – especially as he enters his 30s. Chara is slowing down some and more prone to turnovers and defensive lapses, but still has youthful moments where he steps up with a key poke check, hit or point shot that can sway a game. He also leads the B’s in defensemen scoring, but may be better off playing fewer minutes on a contender where he could conserve energy and have a higher impact. Seidenberg is a workout specialist that would add value as a mentor to either a contending or rebuilding team.

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Ericksson and Chara could each command 1^st round picks and young prospects, as contenders search for that final piece to push them over the top. Some pundits have instead suggested packaging them with a B’s 1^st round pick and prospects to try to get a young legit top 2 defensemen, but that may be difficult without giving up too much. NHL teams won’t easily surrender a young, upcoming top-2 defenseman for rental players. The B’s have also tended to give out 1st round picks like Halloween candy in recent years and it has hurt their development system, so they should keep their picks, make the deals for more top picks and prospects while they still can and continue to rebuild through the draft and free agency. The best teams nowadays build principally through the draft, and the Bruins have too many times dealt away the future in trades like Tyler Seguin’s that have cost them years to rebound from.

In his colorful rollercoaster biography “Crossing the Line” that spans his days with the high-flying Big, Bad Bruins Cup-winning teams of the 1970s, Derek Sanderson wrote about how he understood that hockey is all about entertainment.

With the second-highest priced ticket in the league today and a huge hockey market, it would be great to see Boston with one of the more exciting, entertaining teams in the NHL again. The B’s are on the right path but have a ways to go to reach league elites like Chicago, and it may take another draft or so to snag the game-changing star or two the team could really use. The upcoming draft pool is drawing excitement. “It’s just so fast out there,” said Vancouver general manager and former B’s assistant GM Jim Benning on the NHL Network during the CHL Top Prospects Game Jan. 28. “Every player can really skate and the speed and the skill of the players now is really amazing.”