The first thing one needs to take into account when evaluating the Linus Ullmark trade is that the Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender needed to be dealt away from the Boston Bruins.
The 30-year-old Ullmark didn’t want to be a backup goalie entering the final year of his contract with the Bruins, and the B’s didn’t want to pony up for two No. 1 netminders with RFA Jeremy Swayman about to land a big-money contract following a stellar season. It would have been impossible to keep up the feel-good, goalie hug vibes next season if Ullmark was wearing a baseball hat for 60-plus games while watching Swayman do his thing.
The hugs will live on forever. Thanks for three wonderful years, Linus! pic.twitter.com/3UpVZ4zi99
— Bruins Daily (@BruinsDaily) June 24, 2024
Don Sweeney and the B’s management group made a decision that Ullmark was going to be moved and he was going to absolutely be dealt before he was due a $1 million bonus on July 1 per his contract. But it wasn’t going to be easy as it never is for an NHL team attempting to move frontline goaltenders for something approaching equal trade value.
The reality is that the Senators, Devils and the Kings were the three NHL teams most desperately in search of goaltending help headed into the offseason, and New Jersey and LA were off the market after trading for Jakob Markstrom and Darcy Kuemper earlier this month.
That left Ottawa as the only suitor still remaining for Ullmark, and Markstrom’s deal was the closest comparable where Calgary got a first-round pick and a serviceable NHL roster player (Kevin Bahl) in exchange for the 34-year-old No. 1 goaltender. The Bruins got the first-round pick and the serviceable NHL roster player (Mark Kastelic) but had to take on journeyman goalie Joonas Korpisalo in order to make the trade happen with a first-round pick returning their way.
The statistics, both fancy and regular, don’t lie on Korpisalo, who was among the NHL’s worst goalies last season for the Senators. Korpisalo and Anton Forsberg were bad behind a porous Ottawa team, but the Finnish netminder also has nearly 300 games of NHL experience with a career save percentage over .900 while playing ostensibly for poor teams in Columbus and Ottawa.
The Senators absorbed 25 percent of Korpisalo’s cap hit to make the numbers work for both sides, and to perhaps make him more attractive to other teams if the Bruins can spin him to a third NHL team.
But the Bruins are now on the hook to pay Korpisalo $3 million per season for the next three years to either be a backup goalie, or to be buried in the AHL if they can’t flip him for a draft pick over the next few months.
Still, we are talking about a player in Korpisalo who will take up a grand total of 3.4 percent of Boston’s $88 million salary cap next season and will play a grand total of 20-25 games for the Black and Gold if he plays for them at all. This is not a burden or a salary cap albatross for a goalie that could very easily bounce back and play well in Boston given the unpredictable nature of goaltender performances at the NHL level.
Beyond Korpisalo, though, there may also be some level of disappointment from the Bruins fan base because they were hoping that Boston could pull out a bigger NHL piece like Shane Pinto or Jakob Chychrun. The simple truth, however, is that goalies, even All-Star goalies, don’t command big trade value and that goes doubly so for a player in Ullmark that A) has never even played 50 games in an NHL season and B) has a dreadful .887 career save percentage in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
For all his good qualities, Ullmark has a history of injuries and wearing down both mentally and physically when his workload gets too big, and his past poor playoff performances were absolutely a factor in Swayman getting the ball last spring.
The other parts of the Bruins/Senators deal are big wins for the Black and Gold.
Sweeney and Bruins management wanted to get back into the first round of the 2024 NHL Draft, and they did that landing the 25th overall pick that was originally theirs traded away in the Tyler Bertuzzi trade a couple of years ago.
Some critics may be disappointed the pick is at the back end of the first round, but they may be forgetting that David Pastrnak was selected with the 25th overall pick in the draft exactly ten years ago. In the last decade, the Bruins have drafted Pastrnak, Trent Frederic, Johnny Beecher and Fabian Lysell in the bottom third of the first round, so their track record is pretty solid with that kind of pick.
The other piece, Kastelic, is a 6-foot-4 bottom-6 forward likely destined for the fourth line, but he’s also a physical, heavy player that has a history of blowing up opponents with big hits and fighting the other team’s toughest players.
If you don’t believe me, then watch the YouTube clips.
The 25-year-old Kastelic is also a good faceoff guy at the center spot and might have some room to grow offensively after showing some upside in his career prior to getting to the NHL level. So he’s absolutely going to fill some needs for the Bruins as they continue to build up a bigger, stronger and meaner group of players that should be a little more successful in the postseason after kind of figuring out the regular season formula.
The bottom line with the Bruins trade is that they got the best value that they could while essentially being forced to negotiate with a single team based on market interest and Ullmark’s no-trade clause. They now have more salary cap space than they did yesterday, they now have a first-round pick for this weekend’s 2024 NHL Draft at the Sphere in Vegas, and they have a player in Kastelic that filled a need for them to get a player that isn’t afraid to throw hits or mix it up with opponents.
Was the Ullmark trade a home run for the Boston Bruins?
Maybe not, but Sweeney and the B’s don’t need to start hitting home runs until they begin spending that $25 million in salary cap space that they now hold to lock up a No. 1 center and some primary scoring to add to a hockey team that averaged a paltry 2.38 goals per game during the Stanley Cup playoffs.