Bruins must extend Don Sweeney, and other thoughts

While the other half of the National Hockey League enjoys the gut-wrenching Stanley Cup playoff games, the Bruins are in the midst of their own kind of angst.

They’ve missed the post-season for the first time since 2016. As management embarks on its biggest offseason since Claude Julien was nearing the end of his tenure, here are few thoughts:

* A large and vocal section of the fandom wanted nothing less than a public ritual firing of Don Sweeney at Wednesday’s season-ending presser. Here’s a different take. Team president Cam Neely needs to extend his GM. ASAP.

The Bruins just finished a season that began with a lame duck coach and a lame duck captain. You can blame whomever you want for those situations, but it was very much a part of the failure. At the moment, Sweeney is a lame duck GM. That cannot continue much longer, not with the heavy lifting he’s got to do over the next few months. It starts with the coaching search. While the Original Six crest still carries some weight, there’s going to be a lot of competition with the Rangers (who just extended GM Chris Drury, who had a worse year than Sweeney), Blackhawks, Flyers, Ducks (perhaps the most attractive job from a young talent standpoint) and Kraken looking for new coaches. You’d think that a prospective coach would like to know if the guy hiring him will be there in a year.

And then Sweeney will need to attract free agents on July 1. According to puckpedia.com, the B’s have a whopping $28.2 million in cap space. They’ll need to sign RFAs Morgan Geekie and Mason Lohrei but, after that, they’ll need get a couple of top-six wings and a No. 4 defenseman. Money is the loudest talker, and the B’s have that, but those prospective signees would like to see some stability at the top.

That’s not to say Sweeney shouldn’t be under pressure to get right the signings, coaching hire and top 7 pick in June. But giving the rest of the NHL the impression of stability should help him get it right.

If he doesn’t, and one disastrous year rolls into another, then the decision can be made to go in a different direction. It may cost the organization some money if that comes to pass but, last I checked, the GM’s salary doesn’t count against the salary cap. It’s the price of doing business.

* You can usually count me as a fan of the “retread” route when it comes to coaching hires. Claude Julien won the B’s only Stanley Cup in the last 53 years and he was on his third HC job. Bruce Cassidy and Mike Sullivan won Cups long after their first jobs. Experience, both good and bad, can be very helpful.

But it feels like this Bruin moment calls for some young blood. Sweeney’s strong desire for the next coach to have “NHL exposure” would at least seem to count out Denver’s David Carle, one of the hottest candidates who could make the jump from the collegiate ranks. But the idea is to find the next Spencer Carbery, who went from NHL assistant in Toronto (he was also Jay Leach’s assistant in Providence for a year before getting the head job in Hershey) to the head job in Washington, and very successfully. The Capitals of two years ago have a lot in common with today’s Bruins.

So who is the next Carbery? There’s not an obvious choice, but Sweeney needs to figure that out.

* On Wednesday, Sweeney said that RFA Geekie will be on the team next year. He said it with enough conviction that it gave the impression he’d go to arbitration if need be, though the goal is to get a long-term deal done. Whatever the case, it should cost the B’s at least $5 million per season.

Will it be an over-payment? Some look at Geekie’s 22% shooting percentage, his fortunate pairing with David Pastrnak and think there’s no way that that his 33-goal output will be sustainable. On the other hand, he has a chance to maintain those totals if he starts the season on time, something he hasn’t done in his two seasons with the Bruins. The first could be chalked up to adjustment issues with a new team. But after having a good playoff in 2024, he was extremely cold to start this season, enough to find himself a healthy scratch four times. But he scored 25 of his 33 goals after Jan. 1, tying him with Leon Draisaitl for fifth-best in that time frame.

Geekie planned on examining what he could do differently in the offseason to avoid another slow start.

“Maybe a little less traveling, I drive here in the summer. It’s a long drive,” said Geekie, who makes his offseason home in Calgary. “Maybe that weighs on you more than you think. Maybe you get on the ice too early or too late. There’s a lot of things that I think played into it. I don’t think it was one thing. I came in physically in the best shape that I’ve been in in a long time, and it was just one of those things where I couldn’t get going and think a lot of things compounded, especially with the way we were losing games and mentally, physically, things just weren’t adding up. It’s definitely something I’ll think about the next week or two, and I’m definitely not going to change too much. Just try to get my foot on the gas a little earlier this time.”

* One of these days we’ll put the 2015 draft to rest, but it still haunts this organization, not just on the ice but psychically. That much sure seemed to be the case when Neely voluntarily went there in defense of Sweeney and what the gathered brass coulda, woulda, shoulda done when they found themselves with the 13th, 14th and 15th picks and chose Jakub Zboril, Jake DeBrusk and Zach Senyshyn. DeBrusk turned out to be a legitimate top-six forward but Zboril and Senyshyn never made a mark in the league. Some players chosen after them? Matthew Barzal, Kyle Connor, Thomas Chabot (Zboril’s Saint John teammate), Brock Boeser and Travis Konecny.

Who knows if they’d chosen, say, Connor and Chabot that one or both would not have been salary cap casualties by now. But there’s a good chance 2019 and 2023 – and all the years in between – would have ended differently for the Bruins.

* You may not have liked all the answers in Wednesday’s braintrust press conference, but for nearly an hour Neely, Sweeney and CEO Charlie Jacobs took questions, most of them uncomfortable ones. It may not have been the wisest choice to re-examine 2015 and, no, there’s no good justification for raising ticket prices after such a season, no matter how high the Garden’s electricity bill. But I’m not sure I can remember one of these end-of-season struggle sessions going on so long. For that, at least, they deserve some credit.

* The NHL draft lottery is scheduled for May 5. It appears that defenseman Matthew Schaefer (think Miro Heiskanen) is the clear top pick with center Michael Misa to go at No. 2. At one point it seemed that the next handful of names could have been thrown into a hat, but Moncton center Caleb Desnoyers is gaining steam. He’s currently got 7-15-22 totals in 10 QMJHL games. Producing in big games matters. Meanwhile, The Athletic’s draftnik Corey Pronman has the B’s taking Swedish center Anton Frondell if they remain in the five slot.

The Bruins should get a good player but, as one league executive said on Friday, “there’s not a player in this draft who should be in the league next season.”

So temper those short-term expectations.