It's unclear how many players from their current roster the Bruins will lose this offseason, but we know there will be at least one.
On July 21, the Seattle Kraken, the NHL's newest franchise, get to pick one player from every other NHL team except for the Vegas Golden Knights, who are exempt as a recent expansion team themselves.
The Bruins and the rest of the league must submit the list of players they will protect from the draft by July 17. They can protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goalie, or eight skaters (regardless of position) and one goalie.
Teams don't need to protect unrestricted free agents unless they want to prevent the Kraken from talking to them. They also don't need to protect first- or second-year pros (Jeremy Swayman and Jack Studnicka are exempt, for instance).
The most likely Bruins protection list probably looks like this:
Forwards (7): Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, David Pastrnak, Craig Smith, Charlie Coyle (has a no-movement clause), Jake DeBrusk (despite a poor season, the Bruins won't want to lose him for nothing), Trent Frederic (dropped off in the second half, but is still young and has potential)
Defense (3): Charlie McAvoy, Brandon Carlo, Matt Grzelcyk
Goalie (1): Dan Vladar
That would leave the likes of Nick Ritchie, Curtis Lazar, Chris Wagner, Karson and Ondrej Kase exposed up front, and Connor Clifton, Jeremy Lauzon and Jakub Zboril available for selection on defense.
The consensus seems to be that the Kraken would most likely take one of the young defensemen. Ritchie had the best season of anyone in that group, but Seattle should be able to find cheaper bottom-six forwards. Lazar is a good fourth-line center, but is also an unrestricted free agent after next season.
The question is which young defenseman. There seems to be a growing consensus locally that Seattle would take Clifton. That's understandable. For those of us who watched the Bruins all season, it was pretty clear that Clifton outplayed Lauzon and Zboril, a trend that continued in the playoffs. So the Kraken take the best player, right?
Well... maybe not. In The Athletic's mock expansion draft this week, none of their three writers took Clifton. Ryan S. Clark, their Kraken beat writer, took Lauzon, as did senior hockey writer Eric Duhatschek. Dom Luszczyszyn, who mostly writes about analytics, took Zboril.
So, why the disconnect? Is this just a case of national writers not watching enough of the Bruins and not realizing Clifton was better than Lauzon and Zboril this year?
Probably not. Those three know what they're doing, and there are pretty good reasons to take Lauzon or Zboril even if you think Clifton is better right now.
One is control. Clifton is on a team-friendly, $1 million-per-year contract for the next two years, but then he's an unrestricted free agent. Lauzon and Zboril, meanwhile, are both restricted free agents after next season, meaning the Kraken could easily keep them under team control for at least a year or two longer than Clifton (or even more if they really like what they see next season).
The other is upside. Now, "upside" is obviously in the eye of the beholder, and we don't actually know what the Kraken think of the upside of any of those three defensemen.
Lauzon and Zboril are both two years younger than Clifton (24 vs. 26) and both are a little bigger. Both seem to better fit the model of a modern NHL defenseman, even if they haven't shown it consistently in the NHL yet.
Clifton is an undersized defenseman who's a good skater and solid enough in his own zone, but with little offensive upside. He pretty much is what he is at this point. And that's fine! He's a pretty good sixth or seventh defenseman who can play on the right or left. That's a valuable player to have at the bottom of your roster.
But maybe the Kraken see more potential for growth in Lauzon or even Zboril. Lauzon certainly has to clean up parts of his game (Game 2 against the Islanders was not his only turnover that came off a bad read), but he handled more minutes than Clifton in both the regular season and playoffs and was the Bruins' top penalty-killer in terms of ice time.
That's a valuable, defined role on its own. If the Kraken see room for him to contribute at least a little more offensively and maybe move up from a third-pairing role at some point, then it's not hard to see why they might take Lauzon over Clifton.
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