Boston Bruins: What’s next for David Backes and the Bruins?
David Backes is in the unfortuante spot of being a 35 year old that the Boston Bruins recently waived and assigned to the minor league.
That’s a spot no NHL veteran wants to find themselves in, but indeed, is one that David Backes now finds himself in. The Boston Bruins did their best to keep him in the NHL as long as they could, but simple facts ended up sending him down.
Fact is that he hasn’t met expectations that came with signing a five-year $30 million contract. While he was never a 100-point guy, the realistic expectation was that he’d be good for around 50 points and also bring some grit and toughness.
In all fairness, David Backes has delivered on the grit, toughness and leadership side, it’s just the points production has slowly dried up.
His first season with the Boston Bruins saw a dip from the previous year’s 45 points in St. Louis to 38 points. That wasn’t too bad; you still had hope that it was just a blip and he’d be back above the forty-point marker again.
Year two with the Boston Bruins, he missed 25 games but still put up 33 points. Still diminishing returns, but not bad really. Only thing is that he was being paid $6 million a year. That put his cost at $181,818 a point.
Last year was the year you realised that David Backes truly couldn’t maintain a spot in the modern-day NHL. He only managed 20 points at a steep cost of $300,000 a point. It was clear he was a player in decline, even if he did see ice-time in 15 play-off encounters on the way to Game 7.
This season, it’s been clear since opening night that he no longer belongs in the Boston Bruins line-up. There is a huge need these days to be able to keep pace with the young speedsters and he no longer is able to. His lumbering, slightly more traditional power forward style is going, for the most part, out of fashion in favour of slick mitts and break-neck speed.
You genuinely end up feeling for the guy, who signed a deal believing he could make a difference and no finds himself berated because the club paid such a high price. Here are what we see as the three best solutions for him:
Retirement
The first option realistically is that David Backes, at the age of 35, chooses to retire from the National Hockey League and thus gets the Boston Bruins completely off the hook when it comes to his $6 million contract that still has a year to run.
It’s never nice to throw the suggestion out there that a player should retire, but the fact is the modern-day NHL is ever more a young man’s game and David Backes hasn’t been able to keep up this season.
It stands to reason that the Boston Bruins may have been hoping that waiving him and asking him to report to Providence, which he hasn’t, would be enough to provoke discussions about retirement, and maybe it has.
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Factor in his history of concussions and maybe it’s actually a wise move for him, not as a hockey player, but as a person. More and more research is suggesting that concussions can have potential for ongoing complications. Maybe it’s a wise move to retire while he’s still healthy.
Retirement is the, harsh as it is to say, best case scenario for the Bruins, at least from a business perspective. It means they have $6 million to play with when it comes to renewing the likes of Torey Krug this summer. Maybe it even lets them go after a free agent or two (just not 30 year old ones)!
Perhaps the biggest reason that retirement seems least likely is that Backes hasn’t yet managed to get his hands on the Stanley Cup. Watching his former teammates lift it will no doubt have caused him to double-down on the final few chances he may get.
It’s an option the Boston Bruins might try to talk him into, but it’s well-known that Backes is a character guy (he was an NHL captain for 5 years after all) and I doubt that retirement will feel much like an option to him personally.
Maybe though, he works his way back onto the roster, somehow.
Works his way back onto the roster
The notion of David Backes working his way back into the Boston Bruins line-up seems a little bit absurd, but stranger things have happened.
You’d safely assume that he isn’t the ‘next man up’ if someone goes down injured, not just because burying his salary cost in the minors saves the team some money, but also because he wouldn’t have been waived if they saw a spot for him.
The likes of Anders Bjork, Karson Kuhlman and Anton Blidh all currently hold roster spots over him and you’d expect Trent Frederic and Jack Studnicka to be ahead of him on the depth chart at this point in time, if the Bruins came calling for reinforcements.
This is a player that was still a 14-goal scorer just two seasons ago and while age does change that a bit, it’s safe to say that given the scoring chances he would still be able to net them; maybe not breakaway goals or anything fancy, but those nasty net-front ones instead!
Perhaps this becomes an option if David Backes opts not to retire and a trade partner can’t be found. The Boston Bruins, of course, would be wise though to promote younger guys over him given the play-offs seem an almost guarantee at this point.
Could it be useful to have his experience in the locker-room for a play-off run; absolutely. Whether or not Don Sweeney thinks like that though is a whole different matter.
Of the suggestions, this one seems least likely at this point but had to be mentioned because it’s still a possibility.
Maybe he’s traded away and suddenly isn’t our problem anymore.
Traded away from Boston
This one seems likeliest, at least by wording of Don Sweeney’s statement on Backes’ status with the team. In that statement, he mentioned that he wasn’t reporting to Providence, suggesting it was best to maintain his current healthy state.
Reading between the lines, you take that as; David Backes won’t be reporting to the American Hockey League because the Boston Bruins and player fear he’ll end up injured, which in turn makes him a useless asset when it comes to trade talks.
The biggest difficulty with trading Backes away is finding a suitor that is willing to wear his $6 million cap hit next year as well as the remainder of this one.
Per CapFriendly, only the Colorado Avalanche, New Jersey Devils and Columbus Blue Jackets currently have enough projected cap space to wear the full amount of his cap hit.
The Colorado Avalanche are realistic contenders this season in the Western Conference, thus I doubt Joe Sakic can be convinced that bringing David Backes in would be a good idea.
Likewise, Columbus hedged their bets with their trades last year and would no doubt be asking for a lot, either in terms of prospects or recouping some of the lost draft picks from their all-in approach last summer.
The Devils, well, they’re a bit of a mess and have plenty of younger guys in the room that no doubt could learn a bit from David Backes, but whether they’d truly go for it, I don’t know.
The Toronto Maple Leafs set the market at a first-round pick when they traded Patrick Marleau in the summer and that was on a deal that expired this year. You’d have to expect that may be seen as the cost to get rid of Backes for the Boston Bruins.
On the plus side, if the Boston Bruins were to retain 50% of Backes’ salary, suddenly he fits under 10 teams’ projected cap space and the market is a little bigger. Let’s not forget though that Backes has to agree to be traded as he holds a modified no-trade clause and can opt out of being dealt somewhere he doesn’t want to go.
Next. John Moore has to be traded. dark
It’s going to be interesting to watch this next month and see if the Bruins do manage to swing something that works for both them and David Backes!