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It’s been a weird year in Boston.
You don’t need me to tell you that, though. I mean we just had three straight days of 60-plus degree weather and it’s going to be back down to the low-30s this weekend. But the weather is not what makes this a weird time in the Hub, but rather the day-to-day happenings of the local hockey team.
Back in Boston after a highly successful road swing that came with six of a possible eight points, the Bruins will return to action with a Tuesday night head-to-head against the hapless Arizona Coyotes. If the Bruins win that game -- which they absolutely should -- they will improve to 7-1-0 under interim head coach Bruce Cassidy and potentially move back within four points of the Atlantic-best Canadiens.
Here’s where things get weird.
With all that considered, the Black and Gold, whose front office is led by second-year general manager Don Sweeney, are still expected to continue to watch the trade deadline activity from the sidelines.
Perhaps Sweeney is just a touch jaded from his first deadline, which saw the B’s part with a combined four draft picks and prospect Anthony Camara for a month of Lee Stempniak (from the Devils) and John-Michael Liles (from the Hurricanes). Stempniak left and cashed in with the ‘Canes, while Liles was re-signed as a veteran insurance policy following the Dennis Seidenberg buyout and has been relegated to being the club’s seventh defenseman this year, with five assists in 31 games played.
Perhaps the prices, which are just as insane as always, have scared him off.
And perhaps the market -- which took a massive hit with Monday deals involving Blues defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk (to the Capitals), Van City agitator Alex Burrows (to Ottawa), and big T.B. center Brian Boyle (to the Leafs) -- was never all that enticing in the first place given what the Bruins need.
Nor are these Bruins one player away from magically becoming a legitimate Stanley Cup threat.
So we’re left to wonder: Have the Bruins finally accepted what they denied for so long, and that this is a team in transition that will simply have to live with the growing pains and compete-but-not-truly-compete for a championship until prospects like Charlie McAvoy, Zach Senyshyn, and Jakob Forsbacka-Karlsson (just to name a few) are ready to jump to the NHL?
It would certainly appear that way.
When it’s come to deals that have enticed the Bruins, rarely has a ‘rental’ come up in a meaningful way. They kicked some tires on Shattenkirk, but were not going to ever meet the Blues’ crazy-high asking price, especially not when Shattenkirk, an unrestricted free agent likely to command (and get) a seven-year contract worth over $42 million this summer, can be had for money alone come July. And though they are not rentals, the Bruins have three times balked at Joe Sakic’s asking price for Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog and the sides have by all means stopped calling one another.
What does it mean between now and 3 p.m. on Wednesday? Well, nothing. Quite literally nothing.
If the Bruins do indeed decide to stand pat by the deadline, it will be their first trade-free deadline since 2008, and send the message that this team has lowered their expectations from where they were back in October, when Claude Julien sat a few seats down from team owner Jeremy Jacobs, who announced to the media that he expected this team to put forth a deep playoff run in the springtime. It would speak to the idea that the club has decided to respect the process and figure out which pieces of their core are here to stay, and which can be moved via a trade or unprotected in an expansion draft. And it would largely pit the Bruins against an improved Atlantic Division, at least when you talk about the teams around the Bruins, who all made significant trades in a Monday afternoon arms race.
But doing nothing isn’t actually doing anything. And it’d be the wrong call for this team.
Given the number of veterans and/or bloated contracts on this roster, the Bruins would be wise to see if they could recoup some of their recent picks lost -- the Bruins traded four draft picks last year and have moved 10 via trade since 2011 -- and lessen some of their cap woes moving forward.
An obvious trade candidate would be Liles, who has played just twice in seven games under Cassidy, and is a pending unrestricted free agent. At 36, he is not part of the B’s future plans, and could provide a solid bottom-pairing option or extra body for a legitimate Cup contender. Selling him off the team would not make you a seller per se, either, so there’s little to no harm in that decision. There are rumblings that the Bruins have also let teams know that some of their redundancies on the point -- namely Adam McQuaid and Kevan Miller, two players with multiple years remaining on their contracts, separated by just over a year age-wise and both right-shot defenders -- could be had in a trade.
Forward Matt Beleskey is another player that may be on the move if the right offer comes about.
Beleskey has a very team-friendly no-movement clause, with a 23-team list he can be moved to, and has struggled with just two goals and five assists in 35 games this season. The biggest problem, however, is that the 28-year-old’s value is probably at an all-time low, and he’s under contract for another three seasons at $3.8 million per season after this year comes to a close. Also: the Bruins are painfully thin on the left side and I still think there’s value in keeping Beleskey around and simply hoping that he can hit the reset button and/or channel his game from last season at some point.
It’s also believed that the Black and Gold are still scouring the market for a potential backup option behind Tuukka Rask, with Jaroslav Halak’s name coming up as a possible target, according to a source. Any trade that brings Halak to the B’s would have to come with the Isles eating money and/or taking a contract back the other way, so maybe that’s where one of these previously mentioned players slides into the mix. It’s rather impossible to figure out a straight plan this time of year.
In other words, it’s complicated for the Bruins, which is nothing new.
And I don’t imagine it becoming any less complicated between now and the deadline.
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), can also be found in the New England Hockey Journal magazine, 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.