After listening to Bruins president Cam Neely’s end-of-season press conference on Tuesday, a few things are clear: He wants to make another run at a Stanley Cup next season, he knows the Bruins need to upgrade their roster in order to do so, and there is one position in particular he’d like to see addressed.
Let’s work backwards. When asked if there was one or two key areas that top his wish list in terms of offseason additions, Neely barely hesitated.
“Well, that elusive left D we’ve been looking for,” Neely said. “Can chew up a lot of minutes, maybe play on the second pairing with [Brandon] Carlo. More of a shutdown, some puck movement, some offensive acumen. As we saw, you can never have enough D, and we never seem to have enough for some reason or another. We get banged up. I think our D this year had eight concussions, which is something I just don’t know how to combat. But that position is something we’ve been looking for for a while, and hopefully we can do something to grab someone who’s going to maybe play 20 minutes a game for us.”
Of course, last offseason the Bruins subtracted from the left side of their defense, letting Zdeno Chara and Torey Krug walk in free agency. The hope was that at least one of two of Jeremy Lauzon, Jakub Zboril and Urho Vaakanainen would be ready to step up and take on a big role.
Neely understandably won’t say publicly that plan failed, and he’s not going to criticize those young D, but it’s pretty obvious it didn’t work. The Bruins tried to correct that mistake at the trade deadline by acquiring Mike Reilly, who certainly helped but didn’t singlehandedly fix the problem.
It’s clear that what Neely is looking for is a left-shot defenseman who is bigger, more physical and more well-rounded than both Reilly and Matt Grzelcyk. That doesn’t necessarily mean Reilly, who is an unrestricted free agent, is gone, as it’s possible the Bruins could bring him back in more of a third-pairing role depending on the cost.
It’s not the only area of the roster Neely thinks is in need of an upgrade. He also cited the Bruins’ third and fourth lines, and specifically getting more scoring out of them after the bottom six combined for just one goal in the second round against the Islanders.
“I felt like when we made those deals at the deadline, we had a pretty complete team,” Neely said. “Obviously as everybody knows, you get into playoffs, you pray for health, you pray for good goaltending, you pray for timely scoring. We didn’t get the depth scoring that we thought we might get, that we expected to get. … Looking back, obviously we could’ve used a little more depth scoring. We thought we had the lines to do that, but unfortunately it didn’t unfold that way.”
Neely was later asked if he thinks the Bruins have enough internal options to improve both their offense and defense, and it doesn’t sound like complacency is an option in his mind.
“I don’t think we can look at the roster now when we lose in the second round and say we can compete for a Stanley Cup,” Neely said. “The players that are on the roster that are coming back certainly need to improve. We need to get more out of the third and fourth line. Even the second line, we didn’t get enough out of them in that last series. I think we have to look at improving our roster to improve our chances to win a Cup.”
To that last point, Neely said that making another run at the Stanley Cup -- as opposed to rebuilding -- remains the goal, although he seemed to leave the door open to the possibility that that could change if the Bruins are unable to re-sign some of their own free agents, presumably referring to Taylor Hall and David Krejci first and foremost.
“We have some holes if we can’t get those guys signed,” Neely said. “That would certainly dictate what kind of direction we may have to go in. I can tell you this, I know that March [Brad Marchand] and Bergy [Patrice Bergeron], understandably, would like us to take another run. If we get the pieces signed that we’d like to, it’s worth taking one more shot at it here, depending on what we can do on the back end.”
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