Boston Bruins: Why is it vital to extend Torey Krug beyond this year?
Torey Krug is due a new contract this summer with the Boston Bruins; and they should sign him to one – he’s a vital part in their bid for success.
I’ve never been one to ease into things, so when I found out that I was a new Contributor for Causeway Crowd, I wanted nothing more than my first article to be an absolute banger. So, what better way to lean into one than to write an article about the player who delivered perhaps the biggest Stanley Cup Finals hit in Boston Bruins history, Torey Krug.
A Boston Bruins fan is blue-collar, passionate, and the take nothing from nobody type of fan. We expect skill, toughness, a winning mentality, and of course a team full of players who want to be in the city of champions. So, what has confused me more than anything else since the beginning of the summer? How about the number of fans who have voiced the apparent Bruins’ need to trade Torey Krug before his contract ends in 2020.
Krug, who is 28 years old and playing out the final year of his four-year, $21,000,000 contract ($5,250,000 annual cap hit) is a top pair defenseman for the B’s and is a cornerstone piece to the success of the Bruins powerplay unit.
I’ve heard so many people this summer describe Krug as a defensive liability that it has made me question if I followed the Bruins d-core closely enough or if I had some sort of distorted opinion of Krug’s contribution to this team. Gladly, I can confirm that this is not the case.
Since 2013, Krug has a +/- +29 rating in 462 regular season games. Unfortunately, I know what you Krug-opposing, recency biased readers are thinking, “Ray, tell us the stats in the last year. Who cares about 2013?”.
Well last year, Krug played to a near league average +/- of -2, which ranked him 85th out of 141 eligible defensemen to play at least 60 regular season games. Now for a guy to whom people complain is a defensive liability, a relatively average -2 rating is something I’ll take any day over Zach Werenski (-12), Shayne Gostisbehere (-20), or Rasmus Ristolainen (-41).
Torey Krug’s positive on-ice contribution
To further promote the point of Krug’s positive contribution while on the ice, he finished the season as the sixth best Bruins skater in Corsi %.
Corsi, which measures a player’s ability to influence his teams scoring chances over the opposition’s chances, is a strong metric to view a team’s most impactful, and least impactful players. Krug also ranked as the Bruins top defenseman in this category.
To go a little bit further (not that anyone is truly questioning his offensive ability) Krug finished the season as the 12th highest scoring defenseman in the NHL and had the 7th best points per game out of all defenseman with at least 20 games played in 2018 – 2019. In the past 4 years, the statistics don’t change much as Krug also placed in the top 10 for total points and points per game.
Being a Boston sports fan, I know that the one thing that irritates us more than anything is a player who misses long amounts of time due to injury. After a player goes through a few ‘week-to-week’ stints, we are often too quick to label a player as injury prone and claim that they do not amount to their contract value.
The reality is, it’s nearly impossible to say this about Krug. Besides a few games missed last year, the guy has almost been an iron man for the Black & Yellow – clocking in the 25th most games played out of all active defenseman in the NHL in the past six seasons.
If you want to talk about getting the best bang for your buck, you don’t have to look very long to find it on this Bruins roster.
How much will he cost the Boston Bruins?
Now to the salary talk. The real touchy subject surrounding Krug is the amount of money he is seeking in his next contract, and how long the term will be.
As I mentioned above, Bruins fans are blue-collar. We like to build our teams at a great value, and we would rather have a roster of 4 solid lines than to sign 3-4 superstars and deplete our depth (i.e. the Toronto Maple Leafs).
Time and time again we see Bruins players be criticized for their play if the fans believe they are not performing to their contract value. The players on our team who earn the largest salaries i.e. Tuukka Rask, David Backes, and David Krejci are often subject to this criticism.
I just don’t understand this argument against Krug. Is it because he’s the Bruins highest paid defenseman? Relative to the Bruins cap-hit, Krug is already returning top value for our Beloved B’s, and we are only just entering the prime years of his career.
While I’m on the topic of age, the popular concern about Krug is that he is an aging asset. Um, what? Top 3 defenseman of all-time, Nicklas Lidstrom, won seven James Norris Memorial Trophies (Seven!) as the league’s best defenseman, and his first award came at the age of 31!
If Krug is considered old, I think the shift in mentality to it being a ‘young guys’ game has swayed far too much to the extreme.
Hometown discounts are never a bad thing
At the beginning of this article I wrote that Bruins fans love a player who wants to play for the city of champions, a player who loves the city of Boston.
Don Sweeney has done an unbelievable job of building a culture focused around winning, and he has been able to get our players to sign team friendly deals in order to make this happen.
This summer it was reported that Torey Krug would be willing to take a hometown discount in order to keep this core group of guys together. How could you not love this?
Does a pay-cut mean that Krug will sign a deal worth less than what he’s making now? No. But it does mean that he would rather continue playing in the city of Boston for the rest of his career and do so while making less money than he would if he entered the free-agency market next summer.
So, what do I want to see? I want Torey Krug signed, and soon. I want a long-term contract in the range of 6 – 7 years at an AAV of 7.75 – 8.50 million.
With the league soon to be entering a new bargaining agreement and TV deal, it will most assuredly result in a raise to each team’s cap ceiling. I think that by the time Krug is 34 years old and about to sign his final contract with Bruins, we as Bruins fans will be very happy with Krug’s return on investment.
A changing Boston Bruins team still has room for Torey Krug
Realistically our team is about to go through some changes in the next 3 – 5 years. We have been fortunate to have Zdeno Chara captain our team over the last decade but with Chara retiring in the next year or two, we need to ensure we lock down the next wave of our solid D-core.
Many of us see that future being Charlie McAvoy, Brandon Carlo, Matt Grzelcyk, and Urho Vaakanainen, but it’s time to wake up and view Torey Krug as an integral piece to the future success of the Boston Bruins franchise.
It’s obvious that the Bruins are in win-now mode, and Sweeney should want to keep as much of the core that brought the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Final as possible. The players on our roster have a terrible taste in their mouths after losing on home-ice in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.
This team is willing to sacrifice everything for one another, and Torey Krug is perhaps one of the biggest names on the roster willing to do anything he can to win his first Stanley Cup.
As a life-long Bruins fan, and NHL hockey enthusiast, I don’t think I have ever witnessed a team with such a close bond and strong team chemistry. The city of Boston is lucky to call this team their own, and if Sweeney can keep this core together, they will continue to have success.
Did the Bruins make a mistake with Reilly Smith?. dark. Next
The Boston Bruins organization and their fans don’t just want a Torey Krug long-term contract extension, they need one.