Believe it or not, we are now less than three weeks away from the start of Bruins training camp on Sept. 17. Their first preseason game is Sept. 21. Rookie camp gets underway on Sept. 10. Captains practices start up next week!
What I’m getting at is that we are quickly approaching the end of the real dead zone on the hockey calendar. But while there hasn’t been a whole lot going on just yet, there have been a few items this week that are worth noting. We covered a bunch of these on The Skate Podcast (listen above), but let’s hit on them here as well:
National TV still loading up on Bruins
You might have thought the national television networks would be a little cooler on the Bruins this year after they finished with the fifth-worst record in the league last season, but that is clearly not the case.
The NHL released its 2025-26 national TV schedule on Wednesday, and Boston will be featured a whopping 17 times. That is tied with the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche for the second-most appearances of any team. Only the Washington Capitals (18) have more.
Why? Well, it’s as simple as it’s ever been: Boston is a great hockey market, and fans will watch even if the Bruins are no longer the surefire playoff team that they had been for most of the past 20 years. TNT, ESPN and ABC are betting that the B’s won’t completely bottom out and will at least be interesting enough to still be a better draw than, say, the Carolina Hurricanes (10 national games) – a much better team on paper, but a much worse hockey TV market.
And you can basically forget about the Canadian teams with the exception of the Edmonton Oilers (16 games thanks to Connor McDavid) and Toronto Maple Leafs (14 thanks to Auston Matthews). The Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators, Winnipeg Jets, Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks will all make zero appearances on U.S. national TV (obviously they will all have plenty of games on the Canadian networks).
The Bruins will have eight games on TNT, highlighted by opening night Oct. 8 in Washington and their Black Friday matinee against the New York Rangers on Nov. 28. They have six on ABC, all on Saturdays beginning in January. That accounts for nearly 40% of ABC’s NHL broadcasts this season (6 of 16). They only have three on ESPN, but one is Brad Marchand’s return to TD Garden on Oct. 21 and another is their outdoor Stadium Series game in Tampa on Feb. 1.
The Bruins’ other 65 non-national games will all be broadcast locally on NESN. Perhaps the best news for fans is that none of Boston’s games this season are streaming-only.
Prospect pool rises in rankings
For years, prospect experts have consistently ranked the Bruins’ farm system at or near the bottom of the NHL. There were always a number of factors in that: They traded away a bunch of first-round picks while they were constantly in win-now mode. Even when they kept their picks, they were towards the end of the first round and not in the range where true blue-chip prospects usually get drafted. And, they just had some flat-out misses who didn’t develop the way they would have hoped.
That is starting to change as the organization undergoes this retool, rebuild, reset, whatever you want to call it (Charlie Jacobs used “remake” on WEEI Afternoons at the Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon).
The Athletic’s Corey Pronman ranks the Bruins 20th out of 32 teams in his new “NHL Pipeline Rankings,” up from 29th last year. In a similar ranking of prospect pools, Daily Faceoff’s Steven Ellis has the Bruins at 21 a year after putting them 31st.
So, while the Bruins still rank in the bottom half of the league, there has unquestionably been clear improvement year-over-year. That is because they have added several promising prospects, none more so than seventh overall pick James Hagens.
The Athletic and Daily Faceoff both have Hagens ranked as the eighth-best drafted prospect in hockey right now, ahead of several of the players who went ahead of him in June. Just adding one prospect of Hagens’ caliber is enough to move the Bruins up several spots, especially since they didn’t have any prospects of that caliber before this summer – and really, haven’t had one since Charlie McAvoy or David Pastrnak.
But the Bruins have made other notable additions as well. Fraser Minten, acquired in March as part of the Brandon Carlo trade, is now ranked as their No. 2 prospect by Pronman. Will Moore, a second-round pick this summer, is fourth. Ellis mentions Will Zellers, also acquired in March in the Charlie Coyle trade, as a “key prospect.” Pronman, somewhat surprisingly, does not have Zellers as one of his eight ranked Bruins prospects, but he does have Dans Locmelis as a notable riser – all the way up to third behind Hagens and Minten after his impressive late-season showing in the AHL with Providence and then at the World Championships for Latvia.
No one should be doing backflips over the Bruins’ system just yet, but this replenishing had to start somewhere, and these last six months have at least been encouraging.
But front office confidence is low
The Bruins’ prospect pool may be on the rise, but confidence in general manager Don Sweeney and the front office is not. At the risk of promoting The Athletic too much, I did find this interesting last week. They surveyed fans of all 32 teams with this question: How confident are you in your team’s front office?
And, well, the Bruins plummeted down to 30th this year after ranking 14th in 2024. Obviously, that shouldn’t be too surprising. The team just had its worst season in nearly 20 years, and there are very real questions about when or if this management group can get them back to contending status.
The survey asked fans about six different categories, and the Bruins ended up with a ‘D’ grade in five of them: roster building, cap management, draft and develop, free agency, and vision. The only area where they scored better was trading, where they got a ‘C.’
That all seems pretty fair to me. I might go a little higher on the trading grade, and maybe this year’s draft will ultimately bump up the draft and develop grade if this class pans out the way many think it could (prospect experts by and large loved the Bruins’ 2025 draft, even beyond the Hagens pick).
But it’s hard to have a whole lot of confidence in anything else right now. The last two years of free agency look particularly rough at the moment. Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov did not make the kind of impact the team expected last season, and Sweeney did not add anything beyond depth players this summer, while also handing Tanner Jeannot a very questionable five-year, $17 million contract. Add in Jeremy Swayman struggling in year one of his eight-year mega-deal and it’s just a lot piling up at once. The Bruins desperately need some guys to bounce back big-time this season.
USA strikes gold with Olympic jerseys
USA Hockey held its Men’s Olympic Orientation Camp in Plymouth, Michigan this week, with 44 players taking part in administrative and team-building events (there were no formal on-ice activities). Charlie McAvoy and Jeremy Swayman were both there. More importantly, so were the uniforms the Americans will be wearing in Milan, Italy in February.
All I can say is: It’s about damn time. This is what USA Hockey should look like. If you didn’t really pay attention the last two Olympics because NHLers weren’t there, the uniforms were not good (first two photos below). The 4 Nations Face-Off jerseys in February (third photo below) were better, but still not as good as this 2026 Olympic look.
These uniforms for Milan were originally re-introduced at the national level at the 2014 Olympics as alternates that honored the 1960 team that won the country's first gold in Olympic hockey, 20 years before the Miracle on Ice. They eventually caught on as the regular uniform for the U.S. team at the World Junior Championships and, in the last two years, for the senior team at the World Championships.
Now it appears they will serve as the primary jerseys for 2026, which is a very welcome development. And just a quick note: while these bear some resemblance to the 1980 Miracle jerseys, they are actually a little bit different. Those jerseys had "USA" written horizontally across the front, not diagonally, and they were paired with red pants, not blue.
Shawn Thornton's new job
We found out last week that Shawn Thornton was leaving the Florida Panthers organization after eight years there, most of them serving as Chief Revenue Officer.
Now we know where he's going, and it's outside the hockey world. The NBA's Atlanta Hawks announced on Wednesday that they have hired Thornton as Senior Vice President and Chief Partnership Officer.
Business has been booming in recent years for the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Panthers, and clearly Thornton's role on the business side has not gone unnoticed. While the move from hockey to basketball might seem odd, business is business and partnerships are partnerships. Thornton is clearly pretty good at building them.
Thornton isn't the only Panthers exec leaving the organization this summer, by the way. Team president Matt Caldwell also jumped to the NBA, taking a job as CEO of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Panthers remain loaded on the ice, but it will be interesting to see what kind of effect Caldwell and Thornton's departures have.
QMJHL coming to New England?
All three Canadian Hockey Leagues (the QMJHL, OHL and WHL) will be expanding over the next several years. The WHL has already started, with one new team joining this season and another next year. The QMJHL and OHL have both publicly expressed interest in doing the same.
With CHL players now allowed to play NCAA hockey, Canadian junior teams may lose some players to college hockey, but they are also poised to add even more American players who can now play Canadian major juniors before going to college, a pathway that was never open to them in the past. So, more players means a need and desire for more teams.
The QMJHL, which has teams in Quebec and the Maritime provinces, is currently the only one of the three CHL leagues without a team in the U.S., but that could be changing with the league looking at the possibility of expanding into New England.
Mark Divver, expert on all things New England hockey, posted on X this week that there are rumors of Lewiston, Maine potentially landing a QMJHL team. RG.org's Jimmy Murphy followed that up by adding that Pierre McGuire, with whom he hosts The Sick Podcast, reported that Manchester, New Hampshire is also pushing for a QMJHL team.
Lewiston had a QMJHL team, the Maineiacs, for eight years from 2003-11, and won the league in 2007. A new team could potentially move right into the same arena, The Colisee, which holds 4,000. Portland, Maine had previously been rumored as a possible QMJHL expansion site, but with the ECHL's Maine Mariners already there, perhaps Lewiston makes more sense.
A Manchester team would presumably play at the 9,800-seat SNHU Arena, which has not had a full-time hockey tenant since the ECHL Manchester Monarchs (who replaced the AHL team that left in 2015) folded in 2019.
The more high-end hockey in New England the better, as far as I'm concerned. Lewiston fans got to see a young Sidney Crosby once upon a time. This past season, Bruins fans could have a caught a glimpse of Caleb Desnoyers, one of the prospects they could have potentially drafted in the top 10. And neither of those locations would step on the toes of any college programs.
Sturm attends Patriots practice
New Bruins coach Marco Sturm was at Wednesday's Patriots practice down in Foxborough and spent some time talking to fellow new coach Mike Vrabel. We see a lot of this inter-sports bonding between Boston coaches, but it's pretty cool to see the two new guys get together, especially since they were also here as players around the same time.
Sturm met with some reporters after and said he sees Vrabel coaching with the same kind of energy and intensity that he had as a player. That is something that those who know Sturm see in his coaching style as well.
Sturm also revealed in that clip above that he had just had a meeting with Zdeno Chara, which seemed to get a few Bruins fans excited. I wouldn't read too much into it, though; we already knew that Chara was back in the organization as a consultant. He works with both coaches and players as part of that, so this was probably not anything out of the ordinary.