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Bruins general manager Don Sweeney continued to bolster his team’s bottom-six depth on Wednesday, signing utility forward Tim Schaller to a one-year contract extension worth $775,000.
In his first full-time NHL role, the 26-year-old recorded seven goals and totaled 14 points in 59 games, before adding one goal and 12 hits in six postseason games for the Black and Gold.
Originally a fixture on the B’s fourth line -- which was a revolving door with Schaller getting minutes with Noel Acciari, Riley Nash, and Dominic Moore throughout the year depending on injuries/performance -- Schaller also proved to be a capable top-six fill-in on occasion, with stints as the left-side winger to David Krejci at different points throughout the year.
A Merrimack, N.H. native, Schaller’s extension in Boston was an eventuality after the Bruins extended him a qualifying offer by last week’s deadline, and helps address a potential weakness that came with Moore’s departure to the Leafs, as Schaller is now the only left-handed faceoff option that the Bruins have on their penalty-killing unit. (Sean Kuraly could be one, too, if he cracks the NHL squad.)
And Schaller, while a natural center, played the left wing almost exclusively for the Bruins a year ago, with just 57 faceoffs taken, a figure that ranked him ninth among all Bruins skaters.
“We don’t have a lot of left-shot guys that can come in and take draws,” Sweeney admitted.
“Colby Cave is another player that has done well in Providence and he kills penalties and we think he’ll be in the mix," he continued. "[Jordan] Szwarz has been a good depth player. Really, really established himself last year. He was a good – really good veteran for our group down there. He played with [Danton] Heinen an awful lot and they were a really good line. So, I think he’s another guy, as I said, the depth part of our organization, we wanted to continue. And when you look around the league, there’s a lot of teams that did very similar things that we did [July 1] in that regard.”
With Moore in the fold, the B’s PK returned to near the top of the league, and was the second-best mark of the last seven seasons, second only to 2013’s shorthanded squad that killed off 87.1 percent of their penalties. It was also the breaking of a two-year trend that featured the worst penalty-killing figures of that seven-year sample, with an 82.0 success rate in 2014-15 and 82.2 mark in 2015-16.
As you may recall, 2014-15 was the year that lefty Gregory Campbell truly fell off a cliff for the Bruins, especially on the penalty kill, while the season after saw lefties like Max Talbot and Joonas Kemppainen struggle to be anything close to adequate penalty-killers en route to the waiver wire. It didn’t help Kemppainen and Talbot at all that the Bruins lost their second-best penalty-killing lefty forward, Chris Kelly, just 11 games into the season because of a broken leg.
The Bruins could address this potential shorthanded weakness with a veteran signing like they did with Moore a year ago -- Vern Fiddler and Jay McClement, two experienced centers with tons of a shorthanded experience, remain on the open market -- but they’re like Moore in the sense that they’re talents that wouldn’t be added to the mix until late August. And even then, that may be above their timing, with professional tryouts more likely routes for both.
Or the Bruins could hope that Schaller, who once took Hockey East Defensive Forward of the Year honors, is a capable fill-in option at center with the club shorthanded, and that depth players such as Cave, Kuraly, and/or Szwarz take that next step. Maybe, even, it's something that the Bruins -- who are not as hung up on line-to-line matchups under Bruce Cassidy as they were under Claude Julien, a coach that seemingly always preferred having multiple options at center on the same line during his tenure with the Bruins -- don't even worry about until they have to.
Either way, there’s comfort in knowing that Schaller will be there for the Bruins -- on the wing or at center, at five-on-five or on the penalty kill -- as yet another versatile option for Cassidy.
Camp opens today
Happy first day of rookie development camp.
The Bruins will begin their four-day camp beginning today at 11 a.m. at Warrior Ice Arena.
The sessions are open to the public.
Ty Anderson is the Boston Bruins beat writer for WEEI.com, and has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010. He can be heard on the Saturday Skate program on 93.7 WEEI (Boston), and has been part of the Boston Chapter of the PHWA since 2013. Contact him on Twitter or send him an email at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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