Bruins open up multiple options with waiver-heavy Sunday

It’s a shock whenever a team waives over $8 million down to the minors.

But it’s the route that Bruins general manager Don Sweeney was forced to take ahead of the league’s roster deadline, as the Black and Gold placed veteran forwards Nick Foligno and Chris Wagner, as well as defenseman Mike Reilly, on what was a jam-packed Sunday waiver wire around the NHL.

For the Bruins, the odds of this being a paper move and nothing more seems high. Especially with the cap relief ($3.375 million) being less than half of the dollar amount being waived down to Providence in a true burial.

The Bruins are likely playing the odds ahead of utilizing the long-term injured reserve with Charlie McAvoy and Brad Marchand (both expected to remain on the shelf until late November) by placing three players they don’t see getting claimed by the rest of the league. In the case of Foligno and Wagner, it’s high dollars for limited minutes and roles. And in the case of Reilly, there’s an extra year on the deal that’s up for grabs for nothin’ and while $3 million is seemingly nothing to panic over if you’re looking to add, this summer has proved that it’s become almost impossible to move term.

If unclaimed by 2 p.m. on Monday, all three players are almost certainly going to be brought ‘back’ to Boston in time for the team’s charter to D.C. and Wednesday’s season opening contest in Washington.

But it does open up some interesting scenarios with all three.

In the case of Foligno, what you’d call Awkwardness Part I is over.

The team placed him on waivers. This was always sort of a lingering thought in my brain with the team still staring down the barrel of being cap compliant when fully healthy. If Foligno didn’t get off to a good start, and if he wasn’t able to rebound from his 2021-22 campaign, placing the soon to be 35-year-old on waivers always seemed like an inevitability. (It’s honestly kinda felt like David Backes’ final season in Boston all over again in a lot of ways.)

Training camp didn’t ease the awkwardness on that front.

The Bruins acquired Pavel Zacha in the summer and he’s projected to be the team’s third-line left wing when they’re fully healthy. The Bruins also remain committed to furthering 2016 first-round pick Trent Frederic into a more complete player. And then A.J. Greer burst on the scene and made an undeniable case for a bottom-six role out of the gate. Factor Marchand and Taylor Hall into the mix and the Bruins have six left wings on the roster, and with Foligno looking like the No. 5 on that proverbial depth chart at his very best based on the Bruins’ priorities in 2022-23 and beyond.

Foligno’s frustrations with 2021-22 were also made known. He didn’t think of himself as a fourth-line player (though he accepted it and tried to make the best of it), and he also said that he wasn’t worried about his scoring touch after a Boston debut that featured just two goals in 64 games played. The Bruins said they would consider 10 goals a successful year for Foligno while Foligno himself said he wasn’t going to measure his success by the number of goals scored.

You understand Foligno’s pride. It’s part of what makes him a player that players love playing with, and what gives him an on-ice edge that you saw come to the ice in an effective preseason finale Saturday night against the Devils.

But what if Jim Montgomery thought he had better options and had to scratch a locker room favorite and basically put Foligno back into the 2021-22 role that he never aligned with his beliefs when it came to his game and potential impact?

It just seemed like a really weird spot to put Montgomery in ahead of his first season with the Bruins.

The fact that the first ‘awkward’ move with Foligno has been initiated by Sweeney and the Bruins, and not Montgomery, certainly helps if there’s a Part II if and when Foligno is back with the Bruins.

And for what it’s worth, it does feel like he will be back with the Bruins barring a claim. The players like him. The coaching staff liked his game on Saturday night, and you can see the pluses he could bring in a fourth-line role for the Bruins. Oh, and Foligno hasn’t gone Full 2019-20 David Backes as a concussion-prone player morphig himself an enforcer in an attempt to stay with the big club. It was only once that got too real for comfort that the Bruins not only waived Backes but essentially told him to stay put and not play in Providence.

That said, this moves does open the door to a potential outright burial of Foligno, which while still unlikely, is something many thought was a straight-up ‘never gonna happen’ for the Bruins given the way they’ve backed Foligno again and again.

For Chris Wagner, it’s two late-camp trips to the waiver wire in as many years.

But the good news for Wagner and all of Walpole is that this definitely one feels different.

The writing was on the wall for Wagner in 2021 when he spent almost all of training camp skating with players everyone knew were bound for Providence. Bruce Cassidy’s lineup preferences and Don Sweeney’s Day 1 signing frenzy also left almost no room for Wagner to bump somebody else out of a job and down to the minors.

This time around, Wagner got a fair amount of NHL reps, and emerged as one of Boston’s better physical threats on the bottom six, with a team-leading 21 hits in the preseason. And in addition to drawing two penalties (Montgomery actually remarked on how Wagner has become a bit of an agitator), Wagner helped change the momentum back in Boston’s favor with a battering ram shift after the Flyers’ Rasmus Ristolainen knocked Fabian Lysell out of action with a heavy hit.

That was not lost on Montgomery.

“It’s really important,” Montgomery said of Wagner’s response shift in that win over the Flyers. “There’s a player understanding momentum in a game and getting it back. You could tell the crowd got into it with that shift he had. And it’s also letting the other team know you can’t runs at our players no matter the teammate.”

Playing with house money, Wagner did enough to earn a gig in Boston.

“It’s more of a, ‘What do I have to lose?’ kind of thing,” Wagner admitted earlier in camp. “I’m proud of myself that I was able to come back and play in the playoffs and play decent, too. I still think I can play in this league.”

And the new B’s bench boss sounds like someone who wants Wagner on his roster.

“Yeah,” Montgomery said Saturday when asked if Wagner has made the team. “He provides a level of physicality. Everything’s to be determined though, like when we’re gonna finalize things.” 

The former is more important than the latter here. The Bruins have seemingly circled that 13th forward spot as something that suits Wagner and his game more than it does a younger player (take your pick of Marc McLaughlin, Johnny Beecher, or Lysell) sent to Providence ahead of the final cuts.

If unclaimed, Wagner seems like an obvious recall once the ‘LTIR’ money is available to the Bruins. Or, if the Bruins want, they can shuffle Wagner back and forth between Boston and Providence for the next month whenever they want to get a look at somebody previously reassigned to the minors.

On the backend, there seems to be a decent chance that Mike Reilly is claimed. Or, at the very least, it’s fair to consider Reilly the most likely of the three to get claimed between now and Monday afternoon.

With Reilly set to enter the second year of a three-year, $9 million extension, the Bruins are hoping that teams are either scared off by the extra year remaining on Reilly’s contract or that someone does the team a solid and frees up $3 million off Boston’s books for the 2022-23 season.

This is after a preseason where the left-shooting Reilly looked real strong, with one goal and two helpers and a noticeably more shot-first mentality. And Reilly, who put up four goals and 17 points last year, is also healthier after undergoing offseason ankle surgery for an ailment that had been bothering him for well over a year.

Opening up the possibility of losing that kind of player for nothing in return when your franchise could absolutely look to recoup some draft pick capital lost year after year after year is certainly a gamble.

But perhaps this is the Bruins getting ahead of another inevitable decision.

When healthy, the Bruins have five left-shooting defenseman signed to their roster. That list is headlined by Hampus Lindholm, and behind him it’s Reilly, Matt Grzelcyk, Derek Forbort, and Jakub Zboril. Jack Ahcan is the next man up down in Providence, and is coming off what was certainly his best NHL camp to date.

Given the way he really (understandably) hated sitting as a healthy scratch a year ago, and the way other players’ intangibles put them above Reilly (Forbort’s penalty-killing value certainly ‘buys’ him extra minutes every night), it was always easy to see how the Bruins would look at the 29-year-old as the odd man out if and when fully healthy.

Reilly is also way too good of an NHL player to sit as a healthy scratch, and he’s too expensive to sit in your press box. And though losing him for nothing isn’t anything close to proper asset management, it would essentially be the Advil this front office needs to treat their current salary cap headache.

But it’s also interesting given what we do and do not know about the rest of this defense.

The decision to risk losing Reilly comes a day after Connor Clifton’s rather forgettable end to the warm-up slate, with Clifton on the ice for two goals against and seemingly targeted by the Devils’ Jack Hughes. (That said, the fact that it was Hughes certainly helps ease the blow to the psyche or confidence of Clifton.) Still, Clifton’s often been at his best when starting out as a No. 7 who forces his way into the rotation.

It’s also on the heels of what was a quiet finish to Jakub Zboril’s preseason after an undeniably strong start, with Zboril on the ice for six of the last 10 goals scored against the Bruins. It’s a bit discouraging based on how good he looked out of the gate, but the Bruins aren’t panicking over the bumps in the road for Zboril.

“We have to remember that he is a young man who just came back from ACL reconstruction,” Montgomery said after Saturday’s loss. “The more you play, the more you get the grind of it mentally [and] having to assert yourself again every game to prepare the right way and to make plays. When you’re coming back, you aren’t in a rhythm of playing a lot of hockey games in a short amount of time and he’s going through that right now.

“We knew there were going to be moments where he wouldn’t be consistently good for us, just because of the fact that he was coming back from the injury and all of the time off.”

Reilly’s move to the waiver wire may also mean that Grzelcyk is truly and indeed ahead of schedule.

The 5-foot-9 Boston defender, who projects as a second-pairing fixture when healthy, has ramped up his workload in recent days, and has even ditched the non-contact jersey. But he still needs to take more contact before he’s officially ready to take flight and rejoin the Boston lineup, and the long-term thinking here is that extra time to be 100 percent is better than rushing into things, a source told 98.5 The Sports Hub.

And then there’s Anton Stralman.

In camp on a professional tryout, the 36-year-old Stralman did not suit up for the preseason finale, and didn’t even take part in the warmup for that matter. The current belief is that the Bruins would like to sign him (Montgomery is a big fan of his game), but with Stralman’s family back in Arizona, it probably has to make sense for him beyond the obvious of playing for a good hockey team if he’s going to put the pen to paper.

The LTIR money will be used to sign Stralman (if he’s indeed signed by the B’s), and though that has no impact on Reilly right now, it will if and when the Bruins find themselves weighing the value in a more affordable Stralman over Reilly and his $3 million price tag when McAvoy and Grzelcyk return to the Boston backend.