Don Sweeney has been the Bruins’ general manager for six years now. While he has had hits and misses like any GM in any sport, one night just a month into his tenure remains his biggest miss of all and one that continues to haunt the Bruins all these years later.
On June 26, 2015, the night of the first round of the NHL draft, Sweeney came out wheeling and dealing, first trading defenseman Dougie Hamilton to the Calgary Flames for the 15th overall pick and two second-round picks.
Then he sent left wing Milan Lucic to the Los Angeles Kings for the 13th overall pick, defenseman Colin Miller and goalie Martin Jones. Combined with the Bruins’ own first-round pick at 14th overall, Sweeney held three straight picks in the middle of the first round.
The Bruins hoped to use those picks to move up in the draft, reportedly to target defenseman Noah Hanifin. Zach Werenski and Ivan Provorov also could have been blue-line options in the top 10.
The Bruins were unable to strike a deal, though, and wound up holding onto all three picks. That would have been just fine had they hit on the picks, but they didn’t.
The B’s took defenseman Jakub Zboril at 13, left wing Jake DeBrusk at 14 and right wing Zach Senyshyn at 15. While Zboril was projected by many to go right around that range, DeBrusk was considered more of a late first-round pick and Senyshyn was widely viewed as a second-rounder.
Of the three, only DeBrusk has ever come close to looking like a first-round pick (when he scored 27 goals two years ago), and even his future is now in question after a season in which he scored just five goals in 41 games while being a healthy scratch on multiple occasions, including in Game 5 of the second round.
Zboril didn’t see extended NHL action until this season, and even then he struggled in a third-pairing role. Senyshyn has played just 14 NHL games and offers little more than fourth-line upside at this point.
The three players who went right after the Bruins’ picks turned out to be a lot better. At 16, the New York Islanders took center Mathew Barzal, a player most had projected to go in the top 10-12. Barzal already has an 80-point season and two other 60-point seasons under his belt, and he was on a 60-point pace again this year. Oh, and he just killed the Bruins in the second round.
At 17, the Winnipeg Jets took left wing Kyle Connor, who has already had three 30-goal seasons and was on pace for a fourth this year. At 18, the Ottawa Senators took defenseman Thomas Chabot, who has established himself as exactly the kind of big, mobile, minutes-eating left-shot D the Bruins have been looking for.
The Bruins still don’t have their top-six center of the future to take over for David Krejci and/or Patrice Bergeron, and they’ve had to try to address top-six wing and defense through trades, sacrificing other assets in the process.
Speaking to the media via Zoom on Tuesday, Bruins president Cam Neely reflected on that 2015 first round and what he wishes they had done differently thanks to a question from the Boston Globe’s Matt Porter.
“I’ve looked back at that a lot, obviously,” Neely said. “I think the timing of when we hired Don and then when the draft was taking place, it would have been good, I think, to have a little bit more time between the hiring and the draft. Not to say that Don wasn’t involved in the amateur meetings, but he wasn’t involved most of the time thinking that he was making the picks.
“I think Don did everything he needed to do leading up to that draft to get three first-round picks. I thought the moves that he made were really good and poised to set us up for the future. The guys put the list together. I think maybe during that time, we should have taken some time out. As everybody knows, we tried to move up in the draft. It didn’t work.
“We probably should have taken a timeout and really just digested that list a little bit more. Then there was a pick that one of our scouts really thought that the player wouldn’t be available in the second round. Obviously, hindsight is everything we’d all love to have, moving forward and thinking about making different decisions or better decisions, I guess. You can always do that in every draft though, no matter where you pick and how many picks you have.”
Regardless of what the Bruins should have or could have done differently, that 2015 first round is one that still stings and probably will for a while.
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