Bruins
The Bruins only have a point separating them from a potential top-five pick at this stage of the NHL season.
COMMENTARY
Expectations were high for the Bruins entering the 2024-25 season.
After bowing out to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Panthers in the second round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Boston was seemingly poised to take another step forward this winter — with an overachieving roster set to receive an additional boost via an influx of cap space.
“I’m excited about this year. I really am,” Bruins team president Cam Neely said of the 2024-25 campaign back on Sept. 30. “I think Don [Sweeney] and his staff did a fantastic job this off season in identifying needs that we felt we were lacking to go for a deep run in the playoffs. … I think our record has shown that in the regular season. Now it’s just up to us to make it happen in the playoffs.”
Fast-forward six months, and the Bruins’ hopes of hosting postseason hockey on Causeway Street aren’t just all but snuffed out.
Unlike in both 2015 and 2016 where the Bruins fell just short of a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, the 2024-25 Bruins are closer to the cellar than they are to any tangible postseason berth.
Just how bad has it been since Boston’s trade-deadline firesale?
For all of the hope of a beefed-up Bruins roster being a hard out this spring, only the Buffalo Sabres have fewer points than Boston in the Eastern Conference as of Sunday evening.
The Bruins? A dreadful 69 points over 74 total games.
And the perpetually rudderless Sabres? 68 points … with one fewer game played than Boston.
Yes, the Boston Bruins — a franchise long lauded for its ability to pry open its contention windows well beyond conventional thinking — is on the brink of being the worst team in the entire Eastern Conference.
It’s a stark indictment on just how quickly things have devolved for the Bruins in a miserable campaign rife with regression, free-agent flops, a head-coaching change, and the midseason departures of longtime stalwarts in captain Brad Marchand, Brandon Carlo, and Charlie Coyle.
Silver linings are hard to draw out what currently stands as an eight-game losing streak for a Boston that’s currently tied for the third-longest losing streak in franchise history.
But if the Bruins are going to completely bottom out in a year gone awry, entering what stands as a pivotal offseason with a top-five pick would stand as a welcome consolation prize — especially for a weary fan base in search of a new franchise savior.
Boston’s deadline sell-off has seemingly equipped the Bruins for an accelerated retool in the coming years, with those flurry of moves securing a haul of draft picks (two 2025 second-round picks, 2026 first-round pick, 2027 conditional second-round pick), along with a few promising youngsters in Fraser Minten and Will Zellers.
But even with Boston buoyed with future draft capital, a pair of promising prospects, and over $28 million in cap space this summer, the Bruins’ best chances of crafting a new contention era and maximizing the prime years of David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy lies in the Bruins developing their own homegrown star, preferably down the middle of the ice.
Such a scenario of Boston adding a top-five pick into its barren prospect pipeline is usually a hypothetical best reserved for message-board musings or rants on the sports-radio airwaves.
But Boston’s recent freefall — coupled with stronger play from several other bottom-feeders across the league — has suddenly opened a path for the Bruins to potentially land a premier prospect in late June.
Following a Sunday slate of games that included the Sabres beating the East-leading Capitals, 8-5, and the Penguins defeating the Senators in overtime, 1-0, the Bruins are currently projected to select No. 7 overall, barring a shift in positioning via the NHL Draft lottery.
That current spot on the NHL Draft leaderboard should have Boston in position to add a future top-six pivot like Jake O’Brien (Brantford, OHL) or Roger McQueen (Brandon, WHL).
But given how jam-packed the rest of the cellar-dwellers are in the standings, the Bruins could conceivably leapfrog from pick No. 7 to No. 4 in short order, without having to rely on a stroke of good fortune from the lottery.
The Seattle Kraken currently hold the No. 4 spot in the draft order — but only have one point fewer (68) than Boston.
The Flyers are sitting at No. 5, but have won two straight games after firing head coach John Tortorella and are now tied with Boston at 69 points. Philly has played one more game than the Bruins, hence why they remain above the Bruins in the draft order.
And then there’s the Sabres at No. 6, with one fewer point that Boston (68) and one less game played.
At this point, only teams like the Sharks, Blackhawks, and Nashville might truly be out of reach of the Bruins’ tank, but a top-five pick is starting to look like a very viable option for a Bruins team in desperate need of an elite young talent to add to the mix.
If the Bruins continue to lose — and they very well could this week with matchups against the Capitals, upstart Habs, and Hurricanes on tap — and teams like the Flyers, Penguins, Sabres, and Kraken win a game or two, Boston could be in top-five positioning by the middle of this week.
A top-five pick could give Boston the chance to add a legitimate center prospect like Boston College’s James Hagens, Sweden’s Anton Frondell, or Moncton’s Caleb Desnoyers — giving the team the sought-after pivot prospect that (ideally) could help out at the varsity level in the next year or two.
If the Bruins do end up in the “best-case” scenario — objectively speaking — with their tank and secure that No. 4 spot, Boston will also boost its odds of moving up in the draft lottery.
According to Tankathon, the current team with the No. 4 pick in Seattle currently has these odds in the draft lottery:
1st overall: 9.5 percent
2nd overall: 9.5 percent
3rd overall: 0.3 percent
4th overall: 15.4 percent
5th overall: 44.6 percent
6th overall: 20.8 percent
In other words, a very good chance of sticking in the top-five — and a solid shot at moving up to No. 1 or No. 2, where a team could take a potential top-line center in Saginaw’s Michael Misa (62 goals, 134 points in 65 games) or a future No. 1 D in Matthew Schaefer.
As ugly as this Bruins’ season has been — especially as of late — this post-deadline implosion does have Boston positioned to land an intriguing young player in the next few months.
Yes, watching the Bruins routinely get outshot and hemmed into their own zone for weeks on end has been an arduous task. But the sight of Misa, Hagens, or Frondell feeding Pastrnak one-timers in the next few years could make this month-long stretch of misery worth it.
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