Bruins reportedly looking for a ‘shake-up’ to spark team
Bruins general manager Don Sweeney knows that his team can’t tread water forever.
Even if 8-8-3 is currently good enough to put the Bruins inside a playoff position in the Eastern Conference (they’d be the second wild card if the postseason started today), an 82-point pace isn’t going to cut it. Not when it comes to making the playoffs, and not when you made the kind of investments that the Bruins made this past offseason.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Sweeney and the Bruins are indeed poking around the league to find out what they can do to jumpstart what’s been a horrendous start — again, by their own standards and expectations — to the 2024-25 season.
“In Boston, lost again [Saturday] and they’ve definitely been out there trying to see if there’s something they can do to shake them up,” Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported on last Saturday’s Hockey Night in Canada headlines. “There’s definitely a lot of intensity in Boston.”
And though that was the extent of his reporting on Saturday, Friedman continued that Bruins-centric chatter on Monday on his 32 Thoughts podcast.
“I heard that one of the things the players have talked about is, ‘Look guys there’s a lot of noise around our team right now and we just have to stick together.’ And the tough thing is, is it looked like they were out of it with that double-shutout weekend a little bit ago, but they haven’t righted themselves,” Friedman said. “But I’ve heard that that’s been the message, like, ignore the noise and pull together. And I think they’ve been active about talking about things out there. Boston is obviously a team to watch.”
The Bruins, for what it’s worth, have done just about everything to “shake things up” with what they have in their chamber. They’ve tried dozens of different line combos, and have recently started jumping their minor-league ranks for additional help, with Georgii Merkulov and Jeff Viel among those called up in the last three days alone. If the Bruins are looking for more players to call up to ‘spark’ things in the right direction, 2021 first-round pick Fabian Lysell or North Billerica, Mass. native Marc McLaughlin (goals in five straight games for the P-Bruins) could be the next ones in line.
But if it’s NHL-ready talents that the Bruins seek, or at the very least players who will need less ‘coddling’ to simply get their game trending in a positive direction that boosts the B’s out of the gate immediately, the trade market is clearly where they’ll have to poke around for help.
What’s interesting about the Black and Gold’s situation here, though, is that the Bruins do not have a ton of cap space to work with when it comes to making a trade. In essence, any sort of trade feels like it’ll almost have to be a money-in, money-out kind of move for the Bruins.
The Bruins could try to swing that in a one-for-one kind of swap, or it could be a cap dump of sorts that serves as a prelude to a move that brings in a similarly-priced talent.
To find the last time that the Bruins made an early-season ‘shake up’ kind of trade, you have to go all the way back to 2009, when the Bruins dumped Chuck Kobasew off on the Minnesota Wild for a pick and a prospect before making a move for the Sabres’ Danny Paille just two days later.
It also feels worth noting that during his 32 Thoughts podcast on Monday, Friedman singled out Morgan Geekie as a player who is the last year of his current contract and who at times in 2024-25 has been scratched. Friedman cited Geekie as an example of a situation where the team may think long term and decide to move the player via trade if only because he’s not in their plans beyond the current season.
Geekie, for what it’s worth, is in the final year of his current contract at $2 million per season, and has posted a goal and an assist in three games since returning to the Boston lineup after three straight healthy scratches early in November.
With it being so early in the season, getting a read on some of the sellers out there is a bit tricky at the moment, though it’s worth mentioning that the Penguins have already made one ‘seller’ type of move, with Lars Eller shipped back to Washington earlier this month. And if you’re window shopping in Pittsburgh, some potential names of note could be Anthony Beauvillier (six goals and nine points in 20 games), as well as Jesse Puljujarvi (a 6-foot-4 right shot, 2016 first-round pick with seven points in 17 games) and a potential penalty-killing booster such as Noel Acciari.
The Bruins enter Monday’s showdown with the Blue Jackets ranked in the bottom 10 in the league in goals for per game, goals against per game, power-play percentage, and penalty-kill percentage. Meaning that right now, a ‘shake-up’ could target just about anywhere on this roster.
