December Bruins Blog
What's the Current Outlook for the Boston Bruins after 2 months into the NHL season?
It feels like Don Sweeney’s seat has cooled down significantly since the offseason.
Sweeney and Neely wanted to return to ole’ fashion Bruins hockey last summer and the results have looked promising.
While that heavy style of play is very effective, they also had to find players with high enough skill to provide the scoring to play the “get ahead, stay ahead” style of hockey.
Scoring has surprisingly not been the problem. The B’s have been more exposed defensively because of their inability to maintain their heavy style of play each night.
It’s a grueling schedule and to play each game with that much physicality, it requires legitimate NHL players. We will see which guys can maintain their spot in the lineup as they get back to full strength in the next month. But the outlook for this team in the short-term and long-term is much better than 365 days ago.
Give Sweeney some credit for turning it around that quickly. Not every franchise can reverse outlooks within a calendar year. Much of the credit should go to the Bruins Pro Scouting department honestly. I recommend them for the medal of merit.
These guys have identified low risk, high reward players better than anyone else in the league (I think).
Morgan Geekie, Fraser Minten, Alex Steeves, it goes on. They’ve struck gold mining deep into NHL free agency and trade boards.
The big problem (and this could be from higher ups like Sweeney and Neely) remains the big fish signings. Too many times they have given long-term, big money contracts to free agents that have failed in Boston.
I’m curious to know how they can be so good at finding the lower valued guys in free agency, but so bad finding the higher value ones.
That said, Nikita Zadorov is playing like a legit top defenseman with his skating and physical presence this season. Tanner Jeannot is exactly what you wanted when signed last summer. Jury is still out on Elias Lindholm.
Even though Henri Jokiharju has been underwhelming, there wasn’t much available in free agency for RHD last summer.
Cody Ceci (overpaid by LAK for 4x$4.5m) and Nick Perbix (2x$2.75m from NASH) were options, but both players are not living up to their contracts either.
The Bruins roster likely won’t change much until the trade deadline in March. It could be additions or subtractions, but Sweeney still has 3 months to decide if this team needs more to accomplish something meaningful
.