Don Sweeney may be at his toughest crossroads yet

The Boston Bruins want to add this summer. They want to build on this past season's return to the playoffs and take a meaningful step or two towards Stanley Cup contention. Everyone from ownership on down has made that clear. General manager Don Sweeney reiterated it on Wednesday during his pre-draft press conference at Warrior Ice Arena.

"We’re trying to improve our hockey club," Sweeney said. "We’re competitively driven, as I said. Our players are going to be impatient in that regard. Organizationally, we've tried to look at this as, what's our window? We did a good job to get back and be competitive this year relative to where we were a year ago. We had some players, young players, get integrated and take steps. We'd like to add to the group."

The question that led to that answer was specifically about the possibility of trading the Bruins' first-round pick (23rd overall) in this weekend's draft to acquire help for the present. But it also speaks to the bigger picture about where this organization stands with a critical offseason already underway.

Sweeney is right that the Bruins took a step in the right direction over the past year. But the playoffs, and a first-round exit against Buffalo, offered a dose of reality when it comes to how many more steps the Bruins need to take until they're competing for a Cup.

They gave up too many quality scoring chances. Their offense dried up over the final four games of the series. They struggled to keep pace with the faster Sabres, a problem that would have persisted in potential matchups with the likes of Montreal and Carolina had Boston somehow advanced.

Sweeney touched on all of that when asked to identify his offseason priorities Wednesday.

"I think complementing that group as it sits and being cognizant of the goal-scoring," Sweeney said. "We talked about adding speed. And any time we can add skill to our group, we're going to try and do that. The right side on the back end is an area that we still need to continue to address. Again, I think the speed and skill part of it is something we have to be focused on."

It's a lot of work – almost certainly too much – to get done in one offseason, and that's without even mentioning the elephant in the room: a No. 1 center. Team president Cam Neely correctly noted in May that the Bruins don't have one currently, but will need to find one – either by being aggressive and going out and acquiring one, or by being patient and seeing if a young, internal candidate like James Hagens, Fraser Minten or Dean Letourneau develops into the answer.

Sweeney tempered expectations regarding the former path, not for the first time.

"I mean, our centers, by committee, have done a good job," Sweeney said. "...If you can go out and make a trade, in your description of who might be a true number one, then clearly every team wants to do that. And I think I said this before, I’ll repeat myself: the price was high for a certain player on a team because he looks around and says, ‘I don't know if there are 32 of those players you might want to describe.’ But we feel very good about where our guys are at, and they did a good job this year. So for me, I don't look at this as a negative right now. I think the depth of our center position is really good.

"I think with James [Hagens] potentially going in the middle of the ice, Dean [Letourneau] coming in behind it, Will Moore plays the center, we're positioned. We would love to see one of them really, really pop and turn into a star. I don't think that's any different than how [David] Pastrnak turned into a star. Most of the time it's through growth. Vegas executed a trade with Buffalo a few years ago [for Jack Eichel]. That was a good one. But they're few and far between. So if they present and we have the opportunity, we'd like to pounce on it as much as everybody else would."

Teams don't win the Stanley Cup with a "No. 1 center by committee," though. Sebastian Aho, Carolina's top center this year, would rank among the "weaker" No. 1 centers when you look at recent Cup winners, and he is still a bona fide point-per-game, defensively sound player year-in, year-out.

Pavel Zacha, the Bruins' top center right now, had a career-high 65 points in 78 games this past season. Zacha may very well be a serviceable first-line stopgap until someone else is ready to take up the mantle, but that raises another critical question facing Sweeney: What is he going to do with Zacha?

The 29-year-old Zacha is entering the final year of his contract. He is eligible for an extension on July 1, and is due for a significant raise over his current $4.75 million salary. Sweeney wants to keep him around. Other teams want to know if they can pry Zacha out of Boston, as evidenced by the consistent rumors swirling around him going back over a year.

"I'd prefer to be proactive in that," Sweeney said when asked about Zacha. "I mean, I got asked earlier in terms of whether or not, what's the trade noise? I can't control those things. Teams are going to ask me. Other people have asked, other players, to get out, and sometimes that's a domino effect. My goal is to extend Pav. He had a really good year. He's an important player for us. If you ask Marco [Sturm], he'd say the same thing, how important he is. Maybe it does remain by committee, but he's a big part of our team."

The question is, what kind of contract can the Bruins afford to fork over to keep Zacha? They're already spending $7.75 million a year for five more years of Elias Lindholm, who is clearly not the answer at the No. 1 center spot. Zacha has outperformed Lindholm in Boston, but he's not a true No. 1 center either.

With Minten in a middle-six role already, Hagens seemingly better suited to center than wing, and even Matt Poitras entering a make-or-break year if he remains in the organization, committing more money and years to another middle-six center who will soon be in his 30s should give Sweeney some pause. That money may be better spent on a scoring wing or a top-four defenseman, or saved for the off chance that a legitimate No. 1 center does shake free at some point.

Given the astronomical prices buyers are paying in trades right now (Chicago traded the fourth overall pick plus a second-round pick for Bowen Byram, a good second-pair defenseman), Sweeney may very well be tempted to at least listen to what teams might offer for Zacha in a center-starved market.

"Yeah. I think everything has to be on the table this time of the year," Sweeney said when asked about the possibility of trading off the active roster. "Ultimately, our goal is to improve now and moving forward and having depth in positions or having, as I said, maybe it's a younger player that's able to grow into a role and situation as we did with, as I referenced, with Fraser and Marat [Khusnutdinov]. So we may need to identify the next one, and sometimes that's half a step back for two steps forward, and that just might be what the deal represents, and we'll be open-minded about that. But we have to live in all those spaces. We just do. I'm not promising, but I do believe we're trying to do a little bit of both."

So, what should we expect from the Bruins over this next week-plus? Well, as Sweeney put it, "everything has to be on the table." He wants to add, but has to be cognizant of the extreme prices around trades and free agency this time of year. The Bruins are not in the kind of all-in position they were for so many years in the middle of Sweeney's tenure. He's also willing to sell pieces if someone wants to offer him one of those extreme prices, but a complete teardown is not on the table. The ultimate goal is to get closer to a Stanley Cup while David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy are still in their primes, but there may still be another "half a step back" or two before that path becomes more linear.

This "retool-on-the-fly" plan that began with a trade deadline sell-off in March 2025 was always going to be a bit of a tight-rope act. Sweeney can't just sprint to the other side, and he also can't commit the kind of misstep that sends the whole thing crashing to the ground.