Now that Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney is getting down to his final offseason work of trying to reach common ground with goaltender Jeremy Swayman and minor league forward Marc McLaughlin on new contracts, it seems apropos to consider his top 25 players and isolate something about each one’s game.
Jeremy Swayman: The 50-something starts he will presumably make in his first NHL season as a number-one goalie (in more than uniform number) are uncharted territory, but in the playoff pressure cooker Swayman proved his mettle. The suspicion here is that, had Linus Ullmark still been sharing the net, the Bruins would not have signed Nikita Zadorov.
Joonas Korpisalo: Like Ullmark and Jaroslav Halak before him, this European journeyman is being brought from outside the playoffs into a positive, competitive environment where he can thrive and receive guidance from “Goalie Bob” Essensa, one of the best in the business of what he does.
Nikita Zadorov: How much “Radko” remains in Zadorov’s game is one question, and whether that’s a good thing is another. Opponents will immediately try to goad the 6-foot-6, 248-pound, Russian defenseman into the penalty box and, if they fail, they’ll do the chicken dance and see if that works. For Zadorov to help simplify the game for Charlie McAvoy, he has to tune out the noise.
Charlie McAvoy: Zadorov, Mason Lohrei and Hampus Lindholm will all see McAvoy during the 2024-25 regular season, but it’s the newcomer whose game will make McAvoy feel like he doesn’t have to be both Scott Stevens and Scott Niedermayer on every shift. This should result in a better version of McAvoy as the 26-year-old enters his prime years.
Hampus Lindholm: 2024-25 will be his fourth season as the original Lindholm in Boston’s lineup. Having set a very high bar in the early stages of the 2022-23 season, Lindholm was better in 2023-24 than widely credited. And he made the play that gave David Pastrnak the platform to torch the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 7 overtime. Expect Hampus to be more aggressive with the puck in 2024-25.
Brandon Carlo: The quiet man on Boston’s blue line has been the Bruins’ most consistent, bringing a sameness in his version of excellence that any Stanley Cup contender must have in its top four.
Mason Lohrei: The good news for Lohrei is that his 2024 statement playoffs have put the AHL in his rearview mirror. The bad news is the NHL world is not exactly his oyster. The Zadorov acquisition won’t stunt Lohrei’s growth but will allow his opportunities to occur in more favorable situations.
Andrew Peeke: A classic Don Sweeney acquisition. Drafted 34th overall in 2016 by Columbus, Peeke was only the third right-shot defenseman chosen after McAvoy (14th) and Dante Fabbro (17th by Nashville). With McAvoy and Carlo ahead of him on Boston’s depth chart, Peeke has favorable matchups to steadily improve his overall game during the final two years of a contract paying $2.75 per.
Parker Wotherspoon: No longer buried in the Islanders’ minor-league system, Wotherspoon thrived as a Bruin but is now buried below Boston’s top six D. He has earned steady NHL opportunity, even though he’s now more likely to realize it in a different uniform.
Ian Mitchell: Kevin Shattenkirk is no longer next man up when the Boston Bruins’ powerplay needs a shot in the arm. Mitchell has been a very solid AHLer, so when it’s a right shot and offense that the NHL team needs, he’s a likely recall. When it’s a defensive role or a left-shot situation, that’s Wotherspoon’s territory.
Pavel Zacha: Having spent most of the winter centering David Pastrnak, all is not lost because Zacha got moved around by coach Jim Montgomery for the harder hockey of the playoffs. 2023-24 was a growth curve, as Zacha became core to Boston’s penalty kill among other things. With Elias Lindholm solidifying the center position, 2024-25 will present Zacha with pathway to build his game.
Elias Lindholm: I’d like to have a dollar for every goal or assist that Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci left on the table to act as the primary puck-moving defensemen in an era when the Boston Bruins didn’t have one in their top four. Lindholm will help his linemates score and will net a few himself, but those numbers will stand on the shoulders of what he does for the breakout.
David Pastrnak: As an all-around hockey player and leader, Pasta was actually better in 2023-24 than he had been in 2022-23 when he became the only Bruin not named Phil Esposito to ever score 60 or more goals in a season. Now he gets a fully seasoned centerman, and it happens as both players embrace their prime years.
Brad Marchand: A full year into a captaincy he has handled with aplomb, Marchand the second-year captain will maintain more focus as a player. The question is how long can a skater with hard hockey miles and a 37th birthday during the NHL’s 2025 postseason keep it going as one of the great impact performers of his generation.
Charlie Coyle: The Boston Bruins’ leader without the letter will be in his mid-30s when his contract expires two years from now. Without his stalwart, three-zone play down the middle, the 2023-24 Bruins would have been bouncing on the playoff bubble. Here’s another thing Elias Lindholm will do for the Boston Bruins: share the load and thereby extend Coyle’s prime years in his role.
Morgan Geekie: Incredible that this baseball player wannabe fell off Seattle’s radar and into the Bruins’ lap. An unqualified RFA, Geekie was scooped up last summer by Sweeney and signed for two years (after which he’ll still be RFA!). One of several 2023 signees, Geekie by season’s end was centering Boston’s second line. Did I ever mention how much I enjoy how the puck follows his skates through traffic like Wayne Cashman back in the day?
Trent Frederic: We’ve learned that Monty sees the former first-rounder (29th overall, 2016) as a wing rather than a center. Freddy played every game of the 2023-24 regular season (18-22-40, 69 PIM, plus-9 in 13:45 ATOI), all 13 playoff games (3-2-5, 20PIM, plus-5 in 13:23 ATOI), and was fairly consistent for a forward who moved around the lineup based on need. 2024-25 is a big year for the St. Louis native, who turns 27 next February. The Boston Bruins need more forwards who play a solid, two-way game and thrive on confrontation. Sweeney should try hard to avoid letting him go to market next summer (and to his hometown Blues, who by the way are trying to bring back the toughness that factored in their 2019 Stanley Cup victory over Boston).
Matt Poitras: Like Bob Sweeney, his NHL career started with a shoulder surgery. Before injury took his rookie-pro season off the rails, Poitras showed he can play and that going back to the OHL would have been a mistake. Unlike last season, Poitras can now get some AHL reps if needed.
Justin Brazeau: Slimmed down from his beefier days as a Toronto Maple Leafs prospect, Brazeau skated a short stint in the ECHL and made the most of his reset with the AHL Providence Bruins. His recall to Boston set up a successful if delayed start to his NHL career. Where to for the crafty, 6-5, 220 wing from 11 minutes of ice and an occasional goal is anyone’s guess. Brazeau is UFA in 2025.
Johnny Beecher: The Michigan product with the big wheels found himself in 2023-24 as a penalty killer and reliable, left-shot, D-zone faceoff man. In his case, the next step might come easier than the one that established him as an NHLer.
Mark Kastelic: A big, right-shot center from Ottawa via the Ullmark trade, Kastelic can skate, is strong on the faceoff dot, and has put up a 102-PIM season in between two other seasons in which his PIM’s have matched his games played. Hopefully, the Bruins aren’t viewing him as Frederic’s successor but rather part of a Big, Bad building program. Kastelic’s famous grandfather Pat “Whitey” Stapleton broke into the NHL in the early 1960s with the Bruins, but his father Ed Kastelic is a more immediate reference. See him here tangling with Lyndon Byers. More on Whitey below.
Max Jones: A big, left-shot winger, Jones has a massive opportunity in front of him when the Boston Bruins opened the right-wing position on Charlie Coyle’s line to see some auditions.
Fabian Lysell: At 21, Lysell still has two years remaining on his rookie contract, and while it’s too soon to call his training camp a must-win, it’s a pivotal one with a hole on right wing. Lysell took a major stride in 2023-24, then a terrible hit that sent his season into an unfortunate limbo. He played in one playoff game but wasn’t right.
Georgii Merkulov: The Russian center-wing is essentially a point-per-game AHL player. He needs to put an ill-fated, four-game NHL recall behind him.
Trivia Note 1: Stapleton was not the last Bruin to wear No. 4 before Bobby Orr (Bob McCord had it for two seasons, then Al Langlois), but Stapleton’s NHL legacy is that of No. 12, the short guy in one of hockey’s all-time-great “Mutt & Jeff” defense pairings with Bill White on the Chicago Blackhawks. The two were integral to the Hawks’ early 1970s Cup contention and actually led Montreal 2-0 in Game 7 of the 1971 Cup final on Chicago Stadium ice before Jacques Lemaire stunned Tony Esposito, the best goaltender of the era (15 shutouts in 1969-70), with a rising slapshot from outside the blue line that Tony-O lost against the background. The Canadiens never looked back, and the great Henri Richard turned a sprawling Keith Magnuson midway through the third period to put the Habs on top in the 3-2 victory that allowed the great Jean Beliveau to skate the Cup off the ice in his final act as an active player. Montreal beat Chicago in six when the teams met again for the Cup in 1973, after which the second-year World Hockey Association lured Whitey away from the NHL to where many NHL stars had flocked including Bruins Ted Green, Gerry Cheevers, Derek Sanderson, Johnny McKenzie and Mike Walton.
Trivia Note 2: The 17-43-10, 1966-67 Boston Bruins of Bobby Orr’s age 18/19 rookie season had three plus-1 players: Orr, Ed Westfall and future Minnesota North Stars captain (and receiver of one Hart Trophy vote) Bill Goldsworthy. Except for recalls playing a small number of games, the rest of the Bruins finished in the red. That summer, Bruins Assistant GM Milt Schmidt made the blockbuster trade with Chicago that brought Phil Esposito, Fred Stanfield and Ken Hodge to Boston and solidified the Bruins nucleus that within three years would rise to the top of the hockey world. Hap Emms was still GM when Schmidt did the deal and was not happy to lose defense prospect Gilles Marotte, widely considered the best asset in the entire trade when it went down.
