Bruins
"We needed to turn a page in some regard and do a better job. And that's what we'll do.”
The Boston Bruins held practice at Warrior Ice Arena under their new coach, Joe Sacco after Jim Montgomery was fired as the head coach. Don Sweeney listens to a reporter’s question at a press conference after practice.
Don Sweeney moved several key pieces off Boston's roster on Friday. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff (sports)
By Conor Ryan
March 8, 2025 | 12:01 AM
5 minutes to read
COMMENTARY
As Don Sweeney and Cam Neely fielded questions from the media at TD Garden on Sept. 30, Boston’s top brass relayed a message of confidence in a Bruins roster poised to build off of a promising Cup run months earlier.
“I think if we get everybody in camp and everybody healthy, we’re a Cup contender,” Neely relayed. “There’s no question. I strongly believe that. I think our players believe that, I know our coaching staff believes that. … But I feel like we’re a strong contender if we’ve got our full lineup.”
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What a difference a few months can make.
By the time the dust finally settled on Friday evening, a Bruins roster once propped up with so much promise was stripped down to the studs — the byproduct of a stunning fire sale in the 11th hour of the NHL trade deadline.
For the first time since 2002, Boston’s dressing room will no longer be propped up by a foundational pillar in Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, or Brad Marchand.
The last vestige of that 2011 Cup run has now been torn away following Marchand’s trade to Florida, while key cogs from the last few fruitful seasons in Brandon Carlo, Charlie Coyle, and Trent Frederic have also been shipped out of Boston.
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Just 23 months after the Bruins rewrote the record books with 65 wins in a single season, only six players from that roster still have stalls in Boston’s room: David Pastrnak, Charlie McAvoy, Jeremy Swayman, Hampus Lindholm, Pavel Zacha, and Jakub Lauko.
And less than six months after Neely shared his belief that Boston’s contention window still remained ajar, Sweeney slammed that sentiment shut with his flurry of moves.
“We had underperformance, and we have roster areas that we needed to address,” Sweeney said Friday of a Bruins roster that has now dropped eight of its last nine games. “And that starts with me, and the other areas that the players themselves have to take some [responsibility] and they have.
“They’ve taken ownership that they haven’t played quite as well. But [at] the end of the day, we weren’t going to just roll it back. And that’s probably the message, like we needed to turn a page in some regard and do a better job. And that’s what we’ll do.”
As painful as it might be to see longtime Bruins like Marchand, Carlo, and Coyle shed the spoked-B in search of hockey’s most coveted prize elsewhere — such is the price that the Bruins had to pay after years of investing in the present in pursuit of the same hardware.
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And sure enough, the bill came due for Boston on Friday night.
“You start to look at draft capital that we had been spending over a course of most of the years, it starts to take its toll,” Sweeney said. “And you do have to have a little bit of a step-back approach at times.”
Friday’s decisions stood as the long-awaited coup de grace on a poorly constructed Bruins roster.
Beyond David Pastrnak’s offensive brilliance (22 goals, 50 points in his last 33 games) and Morgan Geekie’s unexpected evolution into Brett Hull (21 goals in 41 games), there have been few positives unearthed from the onerous product put on the ice by Boston this year.
Boston’s decision to invest heavily in size and scrappers over speed and scoring punch was a calculated decision by management — with the Bruins looking to outfit a roster that failed to withstand the punishment doled out by the Panthers during back-to-back playoff runs.
The main flaw in that line of thinking is that a slower, less-skilled roster rarely punches a ticket to the postseason altogether.
Of the 64 games that the Bruins have played this season, they’ve been held to two goals or fewer a whopping 33 times — posting a 5-23-5 record in those games.
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Boston ranks 28th in the league in goals per game (2.69), while also placing 29th overall on the power play (15.0 percent).
The decision to invest $82.25 million in both Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov last July also proved to be a disaster.
Once thought of as an heir apparent to Patrice Bergeron as a top-six pivot, Lindholm is looking more like a defensive-minded 3C operating with a bloated contract — while Zadorov has failed to move the needle on a Bruins defense that has eroded in record time.
While there was some expectation that the Bruins’ offense was due for some regression in 2024-25, Boston’s defense completely eroded in all facets this winter — with a pedestrian showing from Jeremy Swayman (.896 save percentage) doing little to stem the tide.
Put it all together — it would have verged on outright malpractice had Sweeney not taken a blowtorch to this poor product on the ice.
“They’ve been tremendous Bruins,” Sweeney said of Boston’s established leaders who were all sent packing this week. “And now it’s — well, we’ve got another wave that we have to find and see if we can build back to that area.”
As barren as Boston’s lineup looks these days, Sweeney shirked at calling this current undertaking in Boston an outright rebuild.
“Did we come in this morning knowing that we were making every one of these moves? No, but we were prepared if the things that we would like presented, and regardless, that’s a difficult thing,” Sweeney said. “But the message is clearly not about… We didn’t burn it down.
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“We have a lot of guys. Now a couple of those guys in particular are injured that are big, big players and pieces for our group. Now we have to do a better job of building around it and charting the course that says we’re back. And that’s the job.”
All things considered, the Bruins are better prepared for the future — given both their new haul of draft picks and new players added to the mix like Fraser Minten and Casey Mittelstadt.
A potential top-10 pick this June and several other picks in the coming years will allow Boston to replenish its prospect pool — or be used as bargaining chips to add NHL talent to the roster.
Boston still has three foundational talents in place between Pastrnak, McAvoy, and Swayman — who the Bruins will be banking on having a bounce-bounce year in 2025-26.
Several secondary pieces like Pavel Zacha, Morgan Geekie (due for a new deal), Hampus Lindholm, and youngster Mason Lohrei are still in place.
Still, the Bruins aren’t staring at a simple retool this summer — not with the amount of vacancies in place following Friday’s painful bloodletting.
“Clearly, we looked at the opportunities in front of us to change the direction of things without just tearing things down,” Sweeney said. “And that’s not been part of the DNA of this organization and what will be.”
A teardown may not be in Sweeney’s vocabulary — but the roster is what it is at this point.
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Friday’s decision to uproot Boston’s roster in hope of securing greater returns in the future was bold. Now comes the growing pains that have been twenty years in the making for an Original Six franchise — one that has long been operating on borrowed time.
Profile image for Conor Ryan
Conor Ryan
Sports Writer
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
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