The hits just keep on coming for the Boston Bruins.
Following a season where the bottom dropped out after firing the coach and trading away a number of key veterans at the NHL trade deadline, the B’s lost the NHL Draft lottery as well finishing with the seventh overall pick next month. That’s the worst that the Bruins could have done in the draft lottery with the New York Islanders winning the first overall pick and something that had only a 13.5 percent chance of happening.
Looking back on the late season, though, the Bruins didn’t help their own chances when they scratched for a point in their regular season finale OT loss to the New Jersey Devils, even if it did allow them to finish the year with some ounce of pride.
Still, the milk has been spilled at this point and it’s about the Bruins getting prepared to make the seventh pick in the draft. It’s the highest they’ve picked since they had a top-10 pick (No. 9 overall) selecting Dougie Hamilton in the 2011 NHL Draft, and the year picking second overall when they took Tyler Seguin in the 2010 NHL Draft. This 2025 draft class has some excellent center prospects like Michael Misa, James Hagens and Anton Frondell that will likely already be gone by the time Boston makes their selection, but there will be other talented, young pivots like Roger McQueen, Caleb Desnoyers and Jake O’Brien likely still available when the Black and Gold are on the board.
So there’s disappointment that the ping pong balls didn’t go in their favor, but the Bruins know they’ll be getting a good player. Over the last 10 years, Matvei Michkov, Clayton Keller and Quinn Hughes and Dylan Cozens have been selected with the seventh overall pick in a pretty good display of the talent available at that point.
“We're still picking in the upper echelon of the draft, which we haven't done for a significant time period, so we feel very comfortable in terms of where the top seven picks are,” said Don Sweeney. “We'll get a good player and an impact player, regardless of the disappointment of moving back a couple spots. That's just the nature of the lottery.
“I don't think we're going to be anchored in, you know, whether it's [drafting by position], we're just trying to take the best player that has a chance to be the best player in the National Hockey League that he's capable of being. We always value the hockey sense, you always value skating, always value how competitive a player is, and you try to take the best player that you possibly can. We're just in a position now where we're drafting in an area that we haven't been for some time, and we expect to add an impact player.”
The bottom line with the Bruins and this pick is that they really need to land an impact player who’s going to be a core member for the next decade. Coming off a first-round pick where they selected big center Dean Letourneau, who didn’t score a goal as a bottom-6 center for Boston College last season, there are doubters when recent first-round picks have included players in Johnny Beecher, Urho Vaakanainen and Fabian Lysell that haven’t lived up to the hype.
Sure, there are difficulties in drafting late in the first round – or not at all, given the first-round picks they’ve dealt away at the trade deadline over the years -- and that’s something Cam Neely mentioned when he took issue with Boston’s much-maligned draft-and-development pipeline over the last 10 years.
“Obviously, you know, you want to hit on all your picks. There's no question, I mean, the work that the scouts do throughout the course of a year, you know, they put in a lot of time and effort. They understand the players as best they can,” said Neely. “We get the information from the scouts. Don [Sweeney] ultimately ends up making the picks with information that he gets from the scouts throughout the year. But I think that our drafting and developing, the narrative there is a little off, and it's been going on for quite some time. Goes back to [the 2015 NHL Draft] and it was really unfair to Don. By the time Don got hired, it was late May, draft was late June. He wasn't even probably thinking about being a general manager of the Boston Bruins at the time.
“What Don [Sweeney] did leading up to the draft to make the acquisitions that he did with those picks, to get the three picks, I thought was really good. Then Don was trying to move up in the draft. It didn't work out. What we should have done, looking back, we should have taken some time out and said, ‘OK, guys, let's regroup here, we didn't move up, we got three picks in a row’. I think it was very new for everybody. We stood backstage for those three picks. What we should have done was get back to our table and say, ‘OK, let's sit down and say are we okay with our list?’ These are things you try to learn from other picks throughout [and] after that. I think we've got a number of players, not necessarily playing with the Boston Bruins, but a number of players that we have drafted that have played NHL hockey games. We have traded those picks, we have traded some of the prospects to try and improve our club to win Stanley Cups. So I think the narrative that we're not hitting on all of our draft picks, no one is. You pick in the top 10, you better hit. We haven't done that in quite some time. So have we been perfect? No, can we be better? Yes.”
To Neely’s point, they have drafted players like Dan Vladar, Jake DeBrusk, Brandon Carlo, Ryan Lindgren and Jeremy Lauzon that have become established NHL players elsewhere, and they have drafted players like Jeremy Swayman, Jakub Lauko, Mason Lohrei and Matt Poitras that have pushed into Boston’s NHL lineup over the years.
But they’ve also missed with the majority of their aforementioned first round selections over the years. Immediately after Beecher, NHL teams took Shane Pinto, Arthur Kalyiev and Bobby Brink with picks at the top of the second round that have developed into much better players than the offensively challenged Beecher.
In 2017, Robert Thomas was picked two selections after Vaakanainen and Henri Jokiharju has been a much better Finnish-born defenseman selected a little later in that first round by the Buffalo Sabres before getting dealt to Boston.
One could probably do this with every team in nearly every draft because it’s a bit of a crapshoot outside a top-10 selection, but that underscores the bottom line that the Bruins need to hit on this pick in a way they haven’t consistently in the first round over the last decade.