The Boston Bruins have seemed to have this bad habit in recent off-seasons to sign players to risky contracts, one of which, we’re about to discuss.
Nick Foligno was brought in last off-season by the Bruins and I think the hope might’ve been alive that they could have considered his deal to be one of the best bargain signings that year, however, even with Nick Foligno playing in a bottom-six role on the team, it still feels like he underperformed in ways.
Is there a chance that the Bruins can salvage a potential bargain?
It would be a success to say that even with Foligno only signing a two-year deal with the Bruins that even if he had one really good season that it would be easy for the team to consider him a good bargain signing.
Let’s not manage expectations too much here, however, the writing could’ve been on the wall when Foligno took a pay cut leaving the Toronto Maple Leafs to sign with Boston, and when we talk about the pay cut, here’s the breakdown.
Foligno was coming off of a deal where he was making $5.5 million on his annual average salary and took a $1.7 million pay cut to come to Boston. Now, this is something to unpack here a bit. For one, Foligno maybe knew he wasn’t going to get anything better and looked at the options that were available to him as opposed to trying to price himself out of any team being able to sign him. Another way to look at things is perhaps Boston tossed some numbers at Foligno and they just made a deal because Boston wanted him and Foligno wanted to be a Bruin.
All in all, Nick Foligno is a Boston Bruins-type hockey player who leaves it all out on the ice and he’s getting to a point in his career where he’s going be taking on any roles a team is looking to fill. Perhaps the role filling was part of the problem with Bruce Cassidy’s system? Not sure and never will be because Cassidy is long gone and we have Jim Montgomery at the helm. With that in mind, perhaps Nick Foligno could still turn into something more than he was last season.