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Whatever the reason,
Phil Kessel, a player the Boston Bruins drafted with the fifth overall pick in 2006, is playing his professional hockey in Toronto these days.
Tyler Seguin, drafted by the Bruins with the second overall pick in 2010, now calls Dallas his home with the Stars. Both players were three years into their careers and just 21 years old when traded out of the Hub.
These players -- again, for whatever reason -- couldn’t fit into Boston’s long-term future.
The biggest reason for moving these guys out of town seemed to come back to the money they’d make over a multi-year stretch. Or, in essence, how it would require the B’s moving other pieces out.
Five years after the Kessel trade, and less than a year after Seguin’s exodus, there are rumblings that the Black-and-Gold are considering moving some pieces around and out of town in order to bring the soon-to-be 37-year-old
Jarome Iginla back into the fold for another year in Boston. This would be, and this is an understatement if you ask me, a colossal mistake for the Black-and-Gold.
It’d be absolutely moronic in fact, for the Bruins to move legitimate assets out in order to give a multi-year deal to a player on the wrong side of his 30s. It’d go against everything the Bruins said when they dealt faster, younger, and (in the present) greater talents like Kessel and Seguin elsewhere. The team concept has always ruled over the idea of one top-line talent, or so we’ve been told time and time again. Now, whether or not you think that the B’s would be better off with a Kessel or a Seguin is irrelevant when you realize that there’s just something that seems philosophically wrong with moving younger talents to a appease a guy as old as Iginla with a multi-year contract.
It makes no sense.
Is this a slam-blog on Iginla? Of course not. Listen, I think that Iginla was a perfect fit for that first line with
David Krejci and
Milan Lucic. That line didn’t take weeks off like they did when
Nathan Horton skated in No. 12’s spot, and I think that the line’s ability to straight-up bully their way around the attacking zone was an absolute godsend for the Bruins in 2013-14. Iginla was everything he was billed to the Bruins as, and his leadership qualities were noticeable early and often. His teammates loved playing with him, and Iginla genuinely loved playing in Boston.
Factor Iginla’s 30-goal first-year with the B’s into the equation, and it was a perfect match.
But if you’re building a team to compete in 2014-15, does trading a
Brad Marchand ($4.5 million cap-hit through 2016-17),
Loui Eriksson ($4.25 million cap-hit through 2015-16), or
Johnny Boychuk ($3.366 million cap-hit through next year) in order to make room for two years of Iginla make you a better club? I honestly don’t know, ‘cause the trickle down effect on any of those three players goes beyond your lineup. All three play huge parts on your penalty kill, and your overall depth for that matter. Like I’ve said countless times now, I don’t think the Bruins would be wise to move somebody of Marchand or Eriksson’s skill-set for mere cap relief, and I don’t think that you want to move Boychuk and bank on the health of somebody like
Dennis Seidenberg and
Adam McQuaid over the course of an 82-game year and full playoffs.
Let’s not deny facts here though-- the Bruins are screwed. With the NHL salary cap ceiling set at $69 million for 2014-15, the Bruins will have under $6 million to re-sign Iginla, along with restricted free agents
Reilly Smith and
Torey Krug, and find a fourth line forward. That’s with
Marc Savard’s salary on the long-term injured reserve, too, by the way. Yikes City.
The Bruins, still among the favorites in the Eastern Conference, are no longer dealing from a position of strength here. They’re going to have to shed some salary to get under the cap -- with or without Iginla, it seems -- but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be somebody of Marchand, Eriksson, or Boychuk’s caliber. You’d like to think that somebody like McQuaid,
Gregory Campbell or
Chris Kelly bites the bullet out of town before a top-six scorer.
In essence, it’d be wise for the Bruins to not do something stupid (no other way to write it) to appease a 37-year-old veteran that’s only going to be a top-liner for the next year or two at the very most when you have bigger fish to fry throughout the lineup given the cap-crunch that’s on the way.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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