Managing younger players’ minutes continues to be arduous balancing act for Bruins

The Bruins’ locker room might be anchored by tenured veterans such as Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, David Backes, David Krejci and others, but most of Bruce Cassidy’s tenure as bench boss has seen Boston welcome more and more fresh faces up into the NHL ranks.

The youth moment has been well underway since Cassidy’s appointment as Boston’s head coach a little over two years ago, with 12 different skaters making their NHL debuts under Cassidy’s watch since the tail end of the 2016-17 season.

Injuries and a lack of production this season has often forced the B’s to turn to young talent both currently with the club and down in the AHL ranks for some relief. Players such as Ryan Donato and Anders Bjork earned the first crack at holding onto a starting role, while prospects such as Jakob Forsbacka Karlsson and Trent Frederic were later ushered in to give Boston another look — especially at third-line center, a spot where Boston has struggled to find some consistency.

Managing young talent is a facet of the job that Cassidy is more than familiar with — having spent five seasons as head coach of the Providence Bruins prior to his promotion up to the NHL. In some aspects, finding consistency can be even more of a challenge down in the minors, even with the current state of parity in the NHL.

“The thing you run into the American League is that you get young guys and you try to get them to play a certain way and become pros but there’s also the call-up factor. Here, we don’t lose players to call-up, it’s injuries,” Cassidy said. “We had our injuries. But generally, if you stay healthy. With our core group leading the way, I think we can be consistent, I think we have for the most part. We haven’t had any real losing streaks. What we haven’t had this year, maybe we had it last year, was that hot streak where we’ve strung together eight or nine (wins) in a row.

“We’ve done, four or five (wins), we just haven’t had that run that some of maybe the other top teams have gone one. Our consistency here has been pretty good, most of the year. Moving guys in and out of the lineup. And that’s a credit to the veteran guys, the stabilizers that are in the lineup every night. … The American League, I find, is much more difficult in that regard.”

Having those stabilizers such as Bergeron, Marchand and David Pastrnak has helped offset some of the growing pains that come with a 2018-19 B’s roster that opened the year with nine players aged 25 or under.

But even as Boston has managed to string together points in seven straight games and currently sit just two points out of second place in the entire Eastern Conference, Cassidy still has had to keep a close watch on his younger core of skaters — especially from the standpoint of minutes and shifts.



It’s a tough balancing act for Cassidy when it comes to doling out minutes and getting youngsters like Frederic, Donato, Forsbacka Karlsson and more adjusted to the NHL game.

Keeping a healthy influx of young talent will be crucial for this Bruins team to continue to remain competitive years down the road, with prospects such as Urho Vaakanainen and Jack Studnicka likely set to join the cast of players looking to crack a regular role on the club for this coming training camp.

Of course, the best way to season these players up in the NHL ranks is simple — play them. But the B’s are in a bit of an odd situation when it comes to both fostering young talent and focusing on the present.

Boston’s next wave of youngsters might have potential, but the Bruins have to be in a win-now mode — given the age of its main core of contributors like Chara (41) Bergeron (33) and Krejci (32), while both Brad Marchand and Tuukka Rask will turn 31 later this season.

As such, Cassidy needs to maximize what he can get out of youngsters sprinkled further down the roster, because a player like Frederic is not going to get the same workload as he’d currently get on a rebuilding club with a vision set for contention set five years ahead.

As such, players like Donato and Forsbacka Karlsson received very few reps before their latest assignment back down to Providence — averaging 12:30 and 11:48 of TOI, respectively, up in the NHL this season.

Making the most out your time in the NHL when shifts are hard to come by can be a challenge — perhaps best evidenced by Frederic’s current stint up with the Bruins. Boston’s latest candidate to take hold of the vacant spot as third-line pivot, the bruising forward was brought up from Providence in order to give the line a bit of a different flavor from what JFK provided for the previous three months.

As a whole, though, it’s been tough to evaluate what exactly Frederic can provide at this level for right now — given the fact that he’s only averaged 8:33 of ice time over six games up in the NHL.

Cassidy has looked for avenues to get Frederic more ice time, including a few appearances on the penalty kill during Wednesday’s shootout loss to the Rangers. But the results haven’t been there for Frederic while anchoring a line with plenty of turnover. So far, in close to 44 minutes of 5v5 TOI, the Bruins have been out-attempted, 45-39, and edged in scoring chances, 19-6, when Frederic has been out on the ice.

“He’s actually played the power play in Prov,” Cassidy said earlier this week of Frederic. “But here we’ve got guys for that we feel and that’s not an area of concern. PK, we’re trying to build some roles. So that would be an area. But again, all these tight games, we want him to play well. We want to put him in and gain responsibility, but I think the closeness of the games, we’ve had less freedom to do that then say last year with some of the guys.

“We seemed to separate games better. Things were going our way a little more in terms of scoring. But this year, we used him (on Wednesday), he was on the ice in the third period, they got scored on … There’s a certain level of trust you have to have in your players."

When it comes to player development, Cassidy is in between a rock and a hard place. At this point, players like Frederic and Forsbacka Karlsson are the last in-house options to fix Boston’s woes on that third line — but how much are these skaters really gaining from eight to nine minutes of action a night, when they could be logging double that down in the AHL ranks?

It’s a difficult thing for Cassidy to juggle — and another reason why Boston should remain focused on handing the keys to that line over to an established veteran player by the time the Feb. 25 trade deadline rolls around.