MoneyPuck's pre-season Bruins percentages are good news for Gavin McKenna dreamers

It's hard for Boston Bruins fans to understand how bad this season can be until they see it written down on paper. Some parts of the preseason gave a little hope, but seeing the final roster for the first time revealed some serious holes. MoneyPuck released their pre-season percentage wheel on Monday morning, and it gave Boston supporters another slap in the face back to reality.

It used to be a common occurrence to see a lot of yellow on this graphic with the Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Nashville Predators being among the league's top teams. However, with all the teams' rosters being released to the public, the three yellow teams are now barely hanging on.

The Bruins' odds to make the playoffs are 14.5%. For a team that always had a percentage of at least 75%, seeing such a low number is a considerable gut punch. They have the fourth-lowest percentage, tied with the Seattle Kraken. There are only three teams with worse of a chance, the Penguins (7.6%), San Jose Sharks (5.4%), and Chicago Blackhawks (4.8%).

Fans wanted to hold out hope, but in a league that is falling deeper and deeper into analytics, the MoneyPuck formula isn't taking too kindly to the Bruins. To be fair, analytics don't take into account the Bruins' being a visibly more hard-working team in the defensive zone and buying into Marco Sturm's systems, but they do take into account that there aren't a whole lot of scorers on the roster.

The Bruins might resemble the hard-working teams of the past, but it means nothing if they are generating scoring chances and goals at a rate amongst the league's worst. They finished the 2024-25 season with that reputation, and this year's preseason didn't give any reason to believe that will change this season.

Let's hope that the Bruins won't attempt to hang onto relevancy by sticking around the wild card race when everyone knows they aren't Stanley Cup contenders. If the first weekend of the college hockey season told us anything, Gavin McKenna is going to be a valuable prize at the draft in June, and according to the analytics, the Bruins are very close to landing a one-two punch of McKenna and James Hagens for years to come.

The fourth-worst finisher has a 9.5% chance of winning the draft lottery and getting the first-overall pick. While it's hard to see the Bruins being worse than the Blackhawks, Sharks, or Penguins, it isn't a stretch to believe they could finish fourth-worst.

However, after David Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie put the team on their backs and cost the team a top-five pick in last year's draft, it's kind of hard to see them being any worse this year with a revitalized Jeremy Swayman and a healthy Charlie McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm.

While MoneyPuck will have McKenna dreamers thinking that the Bruins have a chance, I'll still lean toward the Bruins being at least slightly better than the fourth-worst team in hockey.