Boston Bruins: Calls to trade David Krejci must be ignored

This summer, there have been plenty of ‘hot takes’ on social media suggesting that the Boston Bruins should trade second-line center, David Krejci.

Whilst I highly doubt Boston Bruins General Manager, Don Sweeney is reading through Twitter and making decisions based on the fan base’s opinions, the team should not even be considering such a move. It’d weaken them significantly down the middle, at a time where their prospects aren’t quite ready to fill the gaps; David Krejci is an asset that shouldn’t be dealt.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand where a lot of these opinions come from. Look at the player’s age; David Krejci is now 33 years old and is on contract for another two years at a cost of $7.25 million per season.

The crux of most fan’s issues with him stem from the fact that he is viewed as an expensive asset when there are contracts that need renewing between now and his deal expiring. The Boston Bruins already seem to have some struggles with getting Charlie McAvoy and Brandon Carlo under the salary cap. Next summer, it’s Jake DeBrusk and Torey Krug both expecting new deals.

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Factor in a mediocre playoff performance and floating the idea to trade David Krejci doesn’t seem anywhere near as absurd. After all, back in the runs to the Stanley Cup Final in 2011 and 2013, he had 23 and 26 points respectively; in 2019, that just was 16 post-season points.

To only look at the recent Stanley Cup Playoff run is to under-sell David Krejci in a Boston Bruins uniform though. After all, it does seem reasonable that he was nursing an injury for at least three of the four rounds, following a big hit by Riley Nash in the Blue Jackets’ series.

Looking at his regular season performance, we’re talking about a guy that, in 81 games, netted 20 goals and grabbed 53 assists, despite having a rolling cast of players lining up alongside him. Last season, he was partnered with no line combination more than 11.8% of the time – his most regular line-mates being Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak or Danton Heinen and Jake DeBrusk.

Now I’m sure there’s argument to be made that the Boston Bruins had a top-three in the league power-play and that padded his stats, but this isn’t the case either. He only tallied 16 of those points on the power-play.

There is plenty of reason to believe that, if he gets a regular cast alongside him on the second line, David Krejci can hit the same heights he did last year; his career high.

Again, I hear the argument that you trade him now whilst he still has considerable value on the trade market, but are you going to get a second-line center in return, realistically?

Or are you going to expect Charlie Coyle to step up to a role that might be one line too high for his skill set and potentially destabilise a team that is coming off the back of a Stanley Cup Final that they took to seven games, I might add.

Yes, it’d be nice to have the cap room to play with but you can’t get rid of such a significant cap hit without losing something. With David Krejci, that’s losing sixty to seventy points per season that you then need to find from elsewhere. That and disrupting the chemistry of a team that he’s turned out for since the 2007-08 season.

Don’t trade David Krejci. Simple.