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Boston Bruins team president
Cam Neely said that the team wanted to get
Brad Marchand signed to a new deal before the start of the regular season. B’s general manager
Don Sweeney saw that and upped the ante, as the Bruins and Marchand have come to the terms on a new eight-year, $49 million contract just hours before the B’s preseason begins tonight.
"This is an extremely exciting day for me and my family," Marchand, currently in Canada for the World Cup of Canada, where he has emerged as one of Canada’s top players, said in a team release. "I would like to thank the Jacobs family, Cam Neely, Don Sweeney, Claude Julien, the coaching staff, my teammates and our fans for their continued support and belief in me. I have been a Bruin since the start of my pro career and there is no place I would rather play. I look forward to doing everything I can to help our team achieve success and bring the Stanley Cup back to Boston."
According to a source, the contract, which comes with an affordable $6.125 million cap-hit, has a full no-trade in the first five seasons, and a varying modified no-trade over the final three.
For the Black and Gold, this was a must-have when it came to their future. The Bruins ultimately proved incapable of handling the loss of
Jarome Iginla and
Johnny Boychuk following the 2014 season, statistically or within their locker room. There was no in-house replacement for
Dougie Hamilton following his trade last season. And it remains to be seen whether the club will be able to deal with the loss of the versatile Loui Eriksson this season. So the risk of losing Marchand, a player with a freakish glove-like fit next to Patrice Bergeron and one that could have netted an $8 million per year contract on the open market, far outweighed the reward.
In fact, there was no reward to letting No. 63 skate without a new deal this upcoming season, and the Bruins rightly realized that their forward corp could not handle a blow of this magnitude.
It’s been a five-year coming out party for the 5-foot-9 forward from Nova Scotia, as his progression from irritant to line-stepper to Team Canada top-liner (only Sidney Crosby, inarguably the best player in the world, with seven points, has more points than Marchand’s five through four World Cup of Hockey games thus far) has stunned most. But not those in Boston or his linemate.
“You have to realize during his rookie year, in the 2011 playoffs when we won the Cup, he was one of the leaders offensively,” Bergeron said of Marchand in a September interview with the
New England Hockey Journal . “He scored big goals. His progression is going upwards and it’s always been. He’s had a reputation at times, but I think people are realizing how good of a player he is as well.”
Since that aforementioned Cup run in 2011 that came with 11 goals (the second-most scored by any NHL rookie on one playoff run) and 19 points in 25 games for Boston, including two goals in Boston’s Game 7 win in Vancouver, the 28-year-old has been a model of consistency in Boston.
Over the five years that have followed, only 15 players have scored more goals than Marchand’s 132. The names on that list include Patrick Kane, Evgeni Malkin, Alex Ovechkin, and Steven Stamkos. But the average cap-hit of those 15 players with more goals than Marchand? $7.7 million per season. And among those contracts,
Max Pacioretty ($4.5 million) and
John Tavares ($5.5 million) are the bargains, but have major paydays looming within the next few seasons (Tavares next season and Pacioretty in 2020), which will only increase the overall average. Substantially, too.
If you include the 10 players below Marchand in terms of goals scored, 11 if you include
Wayne Simmonds, whose 132 goals are just as many as Marchand over the last five seasons, the average salary of those players comes in at $6.04 million per season. That list includes names like Claude Giroux, Logan Couture, Crosby, and even Marchand’s center over that stretch, Bergeron.
And with Marchand’s new deal, the Bruins have locked up the 37-to-63, one-two punch -- a punch that’s lethal in all three zones, mind you -- up at a combined $13 million over the next six years. It’s a best center/best wing price tag combo that most teams would die for, especially in a cap world as tight as the NHL’s, where teams like the Chicago Blackhawks are forced to pay Kane and Toews a combined $21 million and round out the bottom of their roster on near league-minimum talents.
Perhaps the Blackhawks are exempt from criticism given their success as the league’s 21st century dynasty with three Stanley Cups since 2010, but pricy one-two punches can be found almost anywhere, like in Washington, where the Caps pay over $16 million for their Backstrom/Ovechkin one-two punch, or in N.Y., where Rick Nash and Derek Stepan account for over $14 million.
With just $13 million of cap space tied up in Bergeron and Marchand, the Bruins have kept their desire to have extensive cap flexibility very much intact, even with their share of perceived ‘bad contracts’ on the roster depending on your viewpoint, and have almost $14 million in cap space heading into 2017, with just Ryan Spooner and David Pastrnak in need of significant raises on the NHL roster.
The Bruins will have their first preseason contest of the year tonight with a 7 p.m. tilt against the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Sweeney will address the media at 5 p.m. at TD Garden.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can also be read in the New England Hockey Journal magazine. Contact him on Twitter or send him an email at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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