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The Boston Bruins bolstered their already potent forward depth on Tuesday afternoon with the signing of veteran center
Dominic Moore to a one-year, $900,000 contract with the team.
A veteran of 765 NHL contests since breaking into the NHL back in 2003-04, the 36-year-old has spent the past three seasons with the New York Rangers, the team that drafted him 95th overall back in 2000 (though he’s skated for nine different organizations in his career, with the Black and Gold becoming team No. 10), and put up six goals and 15 points in 80 games for the Blueshirts last year.
In an offseason in which the Bruins lost three of their bottom-six center options -- Chris Kelly went back to Ottawa while Joonas Kemppainen and Max Talbot signed deals in the KHL -- four if you want to include Landon Ferraro, who played center at times during his one-year tenure in town, the move for Moore makes sense from a purely depth perspective alone for B’s general manager Don Sweeney.
With Moore in the equation, the battle for the fourth-line pivot job seems between Moore,
Riley Nash (though he’s seemed a little more like a winger option for the Black and Gold), and 24-year-old
Noel Acciari, who worked his way into 19 games for the Big B’s last year.
But Moore’s addition also creates a seemingly massive logjam at center for the Bruins.
Right now, the Black and Gold boast an insanely deep trio that includes
Patrice Bergeron and
David Krejci on lines one and two, while
David Backes projects as a third-line center (or a top-line right wing, depending on the matchup). And that doesn’t factor center
Ryan Spooner, a player who had 13 goals and 49 points in 80 games last year, into the top nine. But even with this ocean-deep depth at center, the Bruins do not have a go-to, left-handed shot center.
The Bruins lost three of those options this offseason in Kelly, Kemppainen, and Talbot, too, and that’s an issue for a Boston group that knows they can’t throw Bergeron and Backes out for every big defensive zone draw. Before Moore, the B’s had just one left-handed shot center, Spooner, and the right-handed Acciari projected at center on the fourth line. Neither are particularly established or known for their faceoff prowess (Spooner finished the year with a 42.8 faceoff percentage while Acciari won 60-of-136 dot battles, a 44.1% success rate).
Those numbers didn’t wow in the d-zone, either, as Acciari won just 18-of-41 defensive zone faceoffs, while Spooner lost 24 more than he won in the same situation. Such struggles played a major factor en route to a league-high 1,978 faceoffs taken by a clearly fatigued Bergeron last season.
In Moore, the Bruins get a guy they know they can lean on in such situations.
Over the last three seasons, Moore ranks 15th in faceoff percentage (54.8%) among centers with at least 2,500 faceoffs, while his 259 shorthanded faceoff wins ranks 13th among that group. And though age has started to creep its way into Moore’s overall productivity, he was still an effective own-zone center option in 2015-16, as his 52.7% d-zone faceoff percentage was tops among Ranger centermen.
Does Moore’s signing take minutes away from some of Boston’s younger pieces? If those prospects perform and continue to progress in the way that the Black and Gold think they can, no it does not. Sweeney has proven himself willing to take away some of Claude Julien’s older players and replace them with youthful, energizing talents if the older players stumble. Moore would not be an exception. It also stokes the fire in Acciari, who should be anything but an NHL lock, after 19 games on a non-playoff team (has simply handing a grind-it-out type of player an NHL spot without some internal competition ever really worked? See: the Bruins banking on Byron Bitz to score 20 goals in 2009).
For the Bruins, this is an affordable case of being proactive versus reactive. It’s as if the club learned from when they lost out on Lee Stempniak for what would have been pennies on the dollar in September, only to have to spend assets to acquire him from New Jersey at the trade deadline.
And in pursuit of ending a two-year playoff drought in Boston, proactive will always trump reactive.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, can also be read in the New England Hockey Journal monthly magazine, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013. Ty can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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