Taylor Hall trade reaction; What's next for the Bruins?
Bruins president Cam Neely and general manager Don Sweeney aren’t closing the door on Patrice Bergeron and/or David Krejci returning, but they did have some interesting comments about the situation on Tuesday.
Neely told reporters at the NHL Draft in Nashville that the Bruins have to “plan like they’re not coming back until we hear otherwise.” He added that they hope to “hear something soon” but “want to give those guys the time that they need.”
According NHL.com’s Dan Rosen, Sweeney said Bergeron and Krejci’s decisions won’t impact how the Bruins approach free agency and that they’ll find a way to fit them in if they do decide to return.
It’s possible that Neely and Sweeney are bluffing here, but there wouldn’t really seem to be any reason to do that other than to unnecessarily add to Bruins fans’ collective anxiety.
If they’re telling the truth, then that’s a different message than the one they were sharing last year at this time.
At least year’s draft, Sweeney said his conversations with Bergeron had “gone well,” that Bergeron was “moving forward with what we think is a positive mindset,” and that Bergeron was “checking off a lot of boxes that have given us strong indications.”
Neely said at the time that, “I'm starting to feel a little more confident that he’s leaning in the direction we want him to lean in.”
We later found out that Bergeron had in fact already told Sweeney and Neely that he planned to return at that point, even though his new contract wasn’t made official until a month later.
So, while Neely and Sweeney aren’t declaring Bergeron and Krejci done – they will rightly allow Bergeron and Krejci to be the ones to announce their final decisions – this is definitely a different tone than what we were hearing from them at this same point in the offseason last year.
Sweeney’s assertion that their decisions won’t affect their plans and they can fit them in later doesn’t really check out either. The Bruins would presumably approach the offseason differently if they knew Bergeron was returning than they would if they knew he was retiring. And for a team that’s going to be right up against the cap no matter how they fill out their roster, it doesn’t seem likely that they would have even a couple million extra lying around for Bergeron and/or Krejci a month or two from now.
Another interesting tidbit from Tuesday’s media availability came from the Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont, who tweeted that Sweeney didn’t sound optimistic about being able to keep any of Tyler Bertuzzi, Dmitry Orlov, Garnet Hathaway or Tomas Nosek.
Trading Taylor Hall in a salary dump on Monday seemed like a prelude to a possible extension for Bertuzzi, so that one in particular would be interesting if Dupont’s read of the situation is correct.
Perhaps if the Bruins are indeed planning like Bergeron and Krejci are gone, the freed-up money isn’t earmarked for Bertuzzi, but for another center.
Stay tuned as things begin to happen quickly with the draft on Wednesday and Thursday and free agency starting on Saturday. We’ll have you covered right here at WEEI.com and on The Skate Podcast, and you can follow me on Twitter @smclaughlin9.
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