Bruins in dire need of a major shakeup before season spirals out of control originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
How many embarrassing losses will the Boston Bruins suffer before management/ownership makes the kind of meaningful changes this team so desperately needs?
The Bruins have suffered quite a few awful losses this season, but none were as brutal as what unfolded Monday night at TD Garden, where the Columbus Blue Jackets earned a shocking 5-1 victory. It was the third straight loss for the Bruins, dropping their record to 8-9-1.
The Blue Jackets scored two (!) shorthanded goals. Six Bruins players, including top-six forwards David Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha, failed to put a single shot on net. Starting goalkeeper Jeremy Swayman gave up five goals on 29 shots.
We could go on and on about what went wrong against the Blue Jackets and the previous nine losses to the Bruins so far this season, but the bottom line is that this team needs major adjustments, whether that be a trade or a coaching change, or both. .
Let’s start with the trading opportunity. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported last Saturday on Hockey Night in Canada that the B’s have been looking at possible moves.
‘In Boston, lost again [Saturday] and they’ve certainly been trying to see if there’s anything they can do to wake them up,” Friedman said. “There’s definitely a lot of intensity in Boston.”
Friedman also spoke on this topic during his 32 thoughts podcast released Monday morning.
“I’ve heard one of the things the players have been talking about is, ‘Look guys, there’s a lot of noise around our team right now and we just have to stick together.’ And the hard part is, it looked like they were out of it a little while ago with that double shutout weekend, but they haven’t righted themselves,” Friedman said. “But I’ve heard that’s the message: Ignore the noise and come together. And I think they’ve been active in talking about things out there. Boston is clearly a team to watch.”
If the Bruins are active on the trade market, what should they look to acquire? A top six winger who can score goals would be a huge boost. They rank 31st out of 32 teams with 2.40 goals per match. The power play ranks last with an 11.7 percent success rate. David Pastrnak is the only elite offensive player on the roster and he is having a disappointing campaign by his standards. Their second best offensive player is Brad Marchand, who is 36 years old.
Help in advance is desperately needed.
The Bruins also don’t have many high-value assets to trade. Their prospect pool is among the worst in the league. Some of the organization’s best young players, including center Matthew Poitras and defenseman Mason Lohrei, have not played well in the first quarter of the season. Lohrei had zero shots and was on the ice for four Blue Jackets goals Monday. Veterans with expiring contracts, including Morgan Geekie (one goal in fourteen games) and Trent Frederic (three goals in nineteen games), are playing far below expectations. Does it even make sense to sell these players low?
The Bruins do not have a second- or fourth-round pick in the 2025 NHL Draft, but they do own all of their future first-round selections. But unless the B’s get a premier young player in return, jettisoning another first-rounder in a trade would be a short-sighted move.
Salary cap space is another issue for the Bruins. They have less than $1 million worth of rooms, according to PuckPedia. They used most of their offseason cap space to sign center Elias Lindholm and defenseman Nikita Zadorov in free agency, as well as re-signing Swayman. All three players have been disappointing thus far, and that’s kind.
Even if the Bruins want to make a move, it takes two to tango. How many teams will be willing to part ways with a key player a quarter of the way through the season? That’s not a good signal to a fan base. Only two teams in the league are more than four points away from a spot in the play-offs going into Tuesday. How many sellers are there currently?
So that brings us to the other way the B’s can shake up the team, and that is a coaching change. Head coach Jim Montgomery is in the final year of his contract. He has tried virtually every possible combination of line and defense. Nothing he does has worked on a consistent basis.
The easiest way to shake things up is to fire the coach. And even though Montgomery is a very good coach, it would be hard to blame the Bruins if they made this move. Something has to be done and Montgomery has not been able to get the most out of his players for nineteen games. The team also lacks discipline (91 minor penalties in the league) and cannot close out games (worst goal difference in the third period). The same mistakes keep happening over and over again.
That said, Montgomery did not build this roster. General manager Don Sweeney sacrificed speed and skill to enter the season with one of the highest and toughest rosters in the league. The results so far have been terrible.
And who would replace Montgomery? The Bruins are ranked below 10 in so many statistical categories, so will sliding an assistant coach like Joe Sacco or Jay Leach into the head coaching role make them that much better? Leach and Sacco are also not doing well enough at the moment.
Most of the blame for the team’s poor start should lie with the players, especially the top players.
Pastrnak has scored two goals in his last eleven games. Lindholm has scored zero goals in his last seventeen games. Zacha is on pace to score 12 goals after scoring 21 in each of the past two seasons. Zadorov (13) and Charlie McAvoy (12) rank No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in minor penalties taken by defenders. Swayman’s save percentage is .884, and he ranks 71st among 75 qualifying goaltenders with minus 7.3 goals expected above, per MoneyPuck.
The Bruins are off on Tuesday and practice on Wednesday. They don’t play again until Thursday when Utah comes to the Garden. The first quarter of the campaign has been awful for the Bruins, and yet they still find themselves in the second wild card playoff spot in the Eastern Conference and six points behind the Florida Panthers for first place in the Atlantic (with two matches still played).
There is still time to save the season, but a big change needs to happen. Quick.
