Are the Boston Bruins seriously considering trading their captain, Brad Marchand, at the trade deadline? It’s a move that no one could have predicted when they made him the 27th captain in their history. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that Marchand would stay with the same team for his entire career, and the Bruins’ offseason moves made that seem like even more of a reality. The Bruins thought they improved their team by adding Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov, but they now find themselves out of a playoff spot halfway through the season.
It doesn’t look like the Bruins’ rest of the season will go any smoother. The Atlantic Division has the same cast of contending teams, with the Detroit Red Wings and Ottawa Senators added to the list with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning, and Florida Panthers this season. The Bruins are, at most, the fourth-best team in the division, and you could argue that they are the sixth-best.
Don Sweeney, Cam Neely, and the rest of the front office have plenty of decisions to make at the trade deadline. Will they also move Brandon Carlo, Trent Frederic, and Morgan Geekie? Geekie is on an expiring contract and may not be worth the expected raise this summer. Carlo and Frederic were pieces of the young core that haven’t met those expectations this season and may not fit into the team’s salary plans in the future.
Marchand is in year eight of an eight-year, $49 million deal. The star would likely take a discount to stay with the Bruins, but they lack assets and could fetch a good return for his services. The worst case for Marchand is that he goes elsewhere and re-signs in the offseason.
Brad Marchand must hand over the keys to the franchise
The Bruins’ fans are getting sick of the middling nature of the organization. Boston has been a force in the Eastern Conference during the regular season, but routinely falls short in the postseason. Many consider the Bruins one of the most successful franchises of the past two decades, but they only have one Stanley Cup and three final appearances to show for it. The Bruins’ propensity to be in the middle has left them with a bare prospect cupboard and no signs of improving that issue.
The Bruins are lucky to leave the last two decades with franchise cornerstones like David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy. Jeremy Swayman’s play hasn’t reflected it this season, but if he regains his form, the Bruins have a potential superstar at every position. The pieces surrounding those players still aren’t enough, and a Marchand trade could find them an asset or two that helps the new core that isn’t getting any younger.
Trading Marchand and other pieces also makes Boston significantly worse this season, and for a team searching for another elite prospect, a top-ten draft pick this season would go a long way. Roger McQueen is a big-bodied center who has been out of the lineup for his junior team since October. The injury has driven down his stock, but his potential is through the roof. He will fall below the top five, but when he is healthy, he has the qualities of a first-overall pick. It’d be a massive gain if the Bruins could sneak in and add him to their center depth.
Eliminating Marchand from the core would happen much sooner than anyone wanted, but sometimes, difficult decisions must be made.
Trading fan favorites worked for the Bruins before
June 26, 2015, is a day when the Bruins’ franchise changed forever. The front office made two trades that day, sending fan favorites Milan Lucic to the Los Angeles Kings for the 13th overall pick and Dougie Hamilton to the Calgary Flames for the 15th overall pick. Sweeney and the scouts made catastrophic errors on draft day, as they missed on a bevy of top players with the back-to-back-to-back picks they had in the mid-first-round, but the strategy would have worked if they had hit on those choices.
The Bruins struggled the following season, which gave them two picks in the 2016 first round, where they took McAvoy and Frederic. The struggles also helped them get Jeremy Swayman in the third round of the 2017 draft. The McAvoy addition changed the team’s outlook, and he was a massive part of their run to Game 7 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Finals. Many assumed if Sweeney had done a better job in the 2015 draft, the Bruins would have landed a seventh Stanley Cup that season and maybe even an eighth somewhere along the way.
McAvoy, Swayman, and Frederic were also massive contributors to the 2022-23 team, which set records for being the most successful regular-season team ever. Although the group fell short in the first round, this was proof that making those hard decisions in 2015 led to some of the team’s success over the past decade. The question you must remember is: where would Boston be if they hadn’t accepted defeat from 2015-2017 and had a mini-retool by trading some of their fan favorites? They’d likely be without a franchise goalie or defenseman and struggling much worse than they are now.
Brad Marchand’s swan song?
It’d be tough to swallow watching a player who has done so much for the franchise walk out the door. Marchand became one of the best left-wingers in the game over the past ten seasons, but you can’t forget about his 2011 playoff performance. Marchand came out of nowhere from the depths of the fourth line to deliver the Bruins a Stanley Cup, and fans will be forever grateful. It’d be right up there in terms of disappointment with the departures of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci if Brad Marchand isn’t a Bruin after the trade deadline, but sometimes, you have to take a step back to start moving forward.
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