The 2024 NHL Trade Deadline has come and gone!
Rosters are (essentially) locked in ahead of a playoff push, with plenty of teams loading up to make a run at the Stanley Cup.
Vegas used their suspiciously timed fake injuries cap wizardry to land both Noah Hanifin and Tomas Hertl. Carolina landed Jake Guentzel and Evgeny Kuznetsov. Tyler Toffoli went to Winnipeg. Florida grabbed Vladimir Tarasenko.
The Bruins did…stuff.
Hard up against the salary cap, the Bruins were never likely to make as big of a splash as they did last season, acquiring Dmitry Orlov, Garnet Hathaway, and Tyler Bertuzzi.
As many anticipated, they were minor players, making just two trades: acquiring forward Pat Maroon from Minnesota and acquiring defenseman Andrew Peeke from Columbus.
(The B’s also signed Parker Wotherspoon to a one-year contract extension and signed AHL forward Joey Abate to a one-year, two-way deal.)
There’s nothing wrong with minor moves or acquiring depth, especially when we all acknowledge that the B’s are still paying the price for (correctly) going all in last year.
The question I have when looking at today’s moves, however, is “why bother?”
The Bruins simply aren’t much better of a team at 5 PM today than they were at 5 PM yesterday — in fact, you could argue they’re not better at all.
I understand acquiring Maroon, who can give the Bruins some of the sandpaper they seem to feel they’re missing (if he can play).
Plus, the cost of acquiring Maroon was low: a longshot draft pick and a serviceable AHLer in Luke Toporowski.
The Maroon signing, in many ways, reminds me of Sweeney’s business this summer: low risk, with potential for a decent reward.
The Peeke acquisition is extremely puzzling, particularly when you consider that he’s on the books for two more years after this season at a cap hit of $2.75 million.
It’s fair to wonder if Peeke’s numbers were terrible because he was on a terrible team, but as many have pointed out, it’s not a great sign when you’re getting healthy scratched by a team that’s among the worst in the league.
If you give the Bruins the benefit of the doubt and agree that they can help him regain his form, why not just wait until the summer, when he was allegedly going to be a buyout candidate?
(I acknowledge that there’s no way of knowing that would definitely happen, but I can’t imagine there were teams lining up to acquire Peeke.)
Plus, are you really going to be able to give a struggling defenseman the rope to “find himself” during the height of a playoff race?
It’s true that defensive depth is always needed in the playoffs, when each series ends up being a war of attrition.
That depth becomes more important with Derek Forbort placed on LTIR and likely out for the season.
Still, depth surely could have been acquired at a similarly low cost without taking on a multi-year contract.
The elephant in the room is the rumor, which Sweeney kind of denied, that Linus Ullmark invoked his no-movement clause to nix a deal due to “geography.”
In that case, it’s fair to assume that Sweeney had a pretty big deal in the works, one that went by the wayside when Ullmark (again, allegedly) said “no.”
That’s fine, too — that kind of stuff happens. Deals fall through. Worth a shot.
I just don’t really understand the Peeke deal.
You didn’t give up much, but you added another wrinkle to your cap situation next year. Why bother?
At his press conference after the deadline, Sweeney mentioned the desire to “give the group a push,” meaning his current roster.
I’m not entirely sure how this achieves that goal.
I don’t really blame Sweeney for not going nuts and trading Ullmark or Jake DeBrusk or Matt Grzelcyk in some desperate bid to match last year’s deadline.
This season has always had a sort of “found money” feeling to me, in that the team is playing significantly better than expected.
Still, that doesn’t mean they’re the class of the East (though it also doesn’t mean they can’t win it all…we know how that goes), and we’ve certainly seen some regression in recent weeks.
In some ways, I give Sweeney credit for being more prudent than some would have liked.
The Peeke deal adds a bit to the cap woes, but he should still be in a pretty good place next summer, when there will be more flexibility to address the team’s needs.
If you’re looking at this season as a bridge year, it’s been a pretty decent bridge — and there’s still time to make it even better.
The confusion comes in the fact that one of your acquisitions makes next year’s cap picture a little more difficult (even if it’s just a million or so dollars).
You didn’t give up much. You also didn’t get much. But you did add a multi-year deal to the books, which isn’t great for a team in the Bruins’ position.
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