Boston Bruins general manager Don Sweeney challenged his team, and when they couldn’t answer the challenge, the embattled GM blew it up.
According to a well-placed source, twice this season, Sweeney gathered the team’s veteran core after he fired former Bruins and current St. Louis Blues head coach, Jim Montgomery back in November, and then again just prior to the Four Nations Face-Off.
Sweeney had just invested in his team’s veteran core by making a free agent splash last July bringing in center Elias Lindholm, 30, on a seven year, $52.2 million ($7.7M AAV) contract and defenseman Nikita Zadorov, 29, to a six-year, $30 million ($5M AAV) contract; and was noticeably frustrated with his club.
According to this source, not once but twice, the Bruins embattled GM warned captain Brad Marchand, alternate captains Charlie McAvoy and David Pastrnak, and veterans Charlie Coyle, and Brandon Carlo, that if things didn’t change on the ice, big changes were coming at the March 7 NHL Trade Deadline.
“Don told the core back in November and again before the Four Nations: ‘If you don’t get this together, changes are coming for you!’ and clearly he held true to his word,” a source close to the situation told RG recently.
The Bruins couldn’t turn it around, as they went 3-6-2 from February 1 until the NHL Trade Deadline a week ago. That resulted in Sweeney holding true to his word and sending shockwaves through the NHL as he traded Marchand, Carlo and Coyle, as well as forwards Justin Brazeau and Marc McLaughlin prior to the NHL trade deadline.
While trading Carlo and Coyle were notable moves, it was the Marchand trade, which netted a conditional 2027 conditional second round pick, that really sent shockwaves through the Bruins dressing room and throughout the league. However, when asked, in his first media availability since being traded last Friday, if he was surprised that Sweeney cleaned house and also traded him, Marchand did not seem surprised.
“I think you could kind of see the way things were going,” Marchand acknowledged to the media this past Tuesday before his new team, the Florida Panthers, lost 3-2 to the Bruins that evening.
“Anytime you don’t achieve what you’re expected to or what you set out to do, they’re going to make changes. I mean, ultimately, changes come when you’re doing well too, but whether you’re going to add or subtract, changes need to be made. Unfortunately, when it’s not going the way you want it to, the changes are going to be bigger. So, yeah, I think we saw the potential for the changes that were going to come.”
Marchand then basically confirmed what the source said above when asked by RG.
“We talked about it; we tried to stop it, and we just couldn’t,” Marchand admitted. “It just seemed like every time we tried to do the right things and change course, it wouldn’t come together for us. Unfortunately, sometimes, things like that happen, and you try to control it, you try to do whatever you can, and it just seems like everything that could go against us, would go against us. I mean, look at the goal in Carolina (a last-second 3-2 loss on March 6), you can’t plan for that stuff. You feel like you’re trying to do the right thing, and everything that could go wrong at that moment goes wrong.
So when that happens, you try to make changes because if you don’t, you could potentially go down that path two years in a row and that’s a bigger problem. So, yeah, we knew there was a potential for this to happen and unfortunately, it did.”
Marchand was then asked point-blank if he knew he could be part of the potential and then likely major changes coming to the Bruins’ roster and leadership core.
“Yeah, I mean, it came to the point where — I’m not going to get into private conversations — but yeah, I knew that there was potential,” Marchand replied.
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James Murphy
