Shipping out of Boston, or how to dropkick a season
Brad Marchand leads a parade of sudden ex-Bruins at the trade deadline
Hockey loves its rituals, particularly the Rookie Warmup. It usually happens when an amped-up kid is making his debut. The lights go down, the music goes up, and the kid charges onto the ice and streaks behind the net and back out to the blueline….where he realizes that no one has followed him. He’s out there doing the Skater’s Waltz by himself.
David Pastrnak is 28. No word on whether he endured such pranks back in Czechia. But thanks to a DOGE-level purge by the Boston Bruins at the trade deadline, Pastrnak will be flying solo for the rest of this lost season. Several of his trusted partners were sent to various airports as the Bruins officially punted. It wasn’t their intention when this slow-motion wreck began, and it certainly isn’t in their blood. But it only takes a couple of bad decisions, in today’s NHL, to get stuck on the ice by yourself.
Pastrnak has 32 goals and 78 points. That’s 31 more points than Brad Marchand, the Bruin-For-Life who, today, is a Florida Panther. And Marchand, 35, has more points than any other Bruin this season. Pastrnak didn’t need words to express his sorrow. He merely posted a photo from above the Bruin bench, showing the backs of three uniforms: Pastrnak, Marchand, Bergeron.
When perennial Selke Trophy winner Patrice Bergeron was playing between the other two, he anchored what was known as the Perfect Line. Two years ago the Bruins were 65-12–5. They set a league record for wins and points. Now, only six players remain from that team, and the Bruins are 28-28-8. Twelve losses? When they dropped a 3-2 decision to Carolina on Thursday, it was their 12th loss since Jan. 18. Still, Boston is three points out of the last playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. True, the Bruins needed a retool at some point, but defeatism is hard to recognize in black and gold.
The self-immolation of the Bruins was just another theme in a mad week of league-wide reshuffling. Carolina ended its 43-day evaluation of Mikko Rantanen and sent him to Dallas, which eagerly signed him to the 8-year, $96 million contract he couldn’t get from either Colorado or the Hurricanes. That, in some minds, made Dallas the Western Conference favorites, but Winnipeg leads the entire league in goals for and goals against, and the Jets got two contentious pickups: Winger Brandon Tanev and defenseman Luke Schenn.
They were hoping to get center Brock Nelson, a Four Nations Faceoff participant, but the Islanders’ center wound up in Colorado, which also took Charlie Coyle off Boston’s hands. And Ottawa, involved in a scrum for an Eastern playoff position, got an overlooked gem in San Jose’s Fabian Zetterlund.
The champion Panthers already had dealt backup goalie Spencer Knight to Chicago for defenseman Seth Jones. They followed it up Friday by getting goalies Vitek Vanecek and Kaapo Kahkonen, in case something befalls Sergei Bobrovsky. Then they shook the hockey world by bringing in Marchand. Already the historians are hoping to see Marchand on the same line with Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett. They’re trying to determine whether there’s ever been a more irritating group, at least since the Backstreet Boys.
All these moves were careful calculations, particularly with a hard salary cap in mind and, in Winnipeg’s case, a lot of “you can’t trade me there” clauses in a lot of contracts. The current Bruins are a reminder of how just a couple of miscalculations, and a couple of interventions by the hockey gods, can spill coffee on those blueprints.
It started last season when Bergeron retired and when second-line center David Krejci returned to Czechia. The Bruins replaced Krejci with Coyle but dropped from second to 13th in goals scored. They won 47 games and, like their historic team the year before, lost to Florida in the playoffs.
This season they threw some coins around and got Elias Lindholm to play center and Nikita Zadorov, at 6-foot-6 and 248, to restore order in the back. Neither move has worked, and now defensemen Charlie McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm are injured. The Bruins also traded defenseman Brandon Carlo to Toronto.
They began this trading period by sending Trent Frederic, who is 6-foot-3 and 221 and loomed large in a lot of rear-view mirrors, to Edmonton. Before the season, they watched Jake DeBrusk defect to Vancouver.
So the vibes were already shaky when training camp began. But at least they had Jeremy Swayman in goal. In that shiny 2002-03 season, Linus Ullmark won 40 games and Swayman 24, and Ullmark had a .938 save percentage and Swayman .920. After every win, no matter which one played, Ullmark and Swayman would wait until all the other Bruins had left the ice, then give each other a bro-hug at mid-ice.
But the Bruins couldn’t pay both, so they sent Ullmark to Ottawa for current backup goalie Joonas Korpisalo, Mark Kastelic and a first-round pick in 2024. Swayman was not an unrestricted free agent, but figured to get a juicy extension anyway. It all went south when Swayman held himself out of training camp, and team president Cam Neely roughed up the waters by saying if he were Swayman, he’d have “64 million reasons” to get with the program. On the eve of the opener, the Bruins did sign Swayman for eight years and $66 million. Swayman has responded with his unsteadiest season. In one-fifth of his starts his save percentage has been under .850, and his record is 18-21-6.
The Bruins’ defenders say they have restocked the well with draft choices, and they got top prospect Fraser Minten in the Carlo deal, and that Casey Mittelstadt, who came over for Coyle, can handle second-line center. Pastrnak, Swayman and McAvoy are a solid core. But when Tampa Bay general manager Julien BriseBois got Yanni Gourde and Oliver Bjorkstrand from Seattle in exchange for two first-rounders, he said, “I’d rather have a bunch of good players than a ton of draft picks.” The Lightning has been to the playoffs 10 of the past 11 years and made four trips to the Stanley Cup Final, winning two.
NHL coaches usually get the bill when the roof starts leaking. Jim Montgomery was the mastermind of the 2003 season, but he was also on the bench for the playoff flameout. The Bruins canned him after 16 games this season. In about five seconds. St. Louis scooped up Montgomery, and now the Blues have won six of seven and are one point out of the Western playoffs. The last coach the Bruins fired was Bruce Cassidy, who was hoisting the Stanley Cup in Las Vegas 21 months ago.
Boston fans, like most of the rest of us, lose an hour on Saturday night, and they’ll be confronted with the new reality soon enough. On Tuesday night the Panthers come to Boston, and even though Marchand is a week-to-week case with an upper-body injury, he’ll likely be there. Either now or in his next actual game in the Garden, he can count on a melancholy video tribute, perhaps to the tune of “The Way We Were.”