It’s become fairly rote over the last few years for those slagging the Boston Bruins organization to take aim and fire directly at Boston’s draft-and-development system as a major problem.
And those naysayers haven’t exactly been wrong when doing so.
The sheer number of homegrown players that end up sticking with the Boston roster hasn’t been overwhelming in recent club history, and Charlie McAvoy (14th overall in the 2016 NHL Draft) and Jeremy Swayman (111th overall in the 2017 NHL Draft) serve as really the only current impact guys that the Black and Gold have hand-picked and developed over the last 10 years.
That’s not a lot considering the Bruins have drafted 55 players over the span of last 10 drafts and have made a grand total of seven first-round selections over the span, including this past June’s draft when they picked uber prospect James Hagens seventh overall.
James Hagens — creating passing lanes.
— Hadi Kalakeche (@HadiK_Scouting) July 29, 2025
Angles left, sets up the hip pocket and looks to the net, hinting shot. D commits, Hagens looks off his target, hits the seam he created.
The pass is perfect, but everything leading up to it is more impressive.
pic.twitter.com/5564b4GXzP
The dearth of homegrown talent saw the Bruins rank dead last in The Athletic’s “NHL Pipeline Rankings” in back-to-back rankings much to the chagrin of Black and Gold management, and it at least partially helped lead to Boston’s precipitous drop to the bottom of the standings last season.
For the 2nd summer in a row, the Boston Bruins organizational prospect pipeline has been ranked 32nd...dead last in the NHL. Why is that & what needs to be done about it? This is something that's obviously going to have to become more of a priority
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) August 30, 2023
Link: https://t.co/7wKLLxff0e pic.twitter.com/vzzJsJoIh3
Of course, the Bruins have some reasons for why things went so wrong with their drafting over a stretch of time where they shipped away first round picks for “win now” moves at the NHL trade deadline, and the quality of the NHL team had the B’s consistently selecting in the late first round where picks can be a little more of a crap shoot.
Johnny Beecher certainly qualifies in that category as the 30th overall pick, but then again Urho Vaakanainen (18th overall) and Fabian Lysell (21st overall) were picks made close to the middle of the first round than the very end of it.
Some of that reasoning was on display at the end of last season when Bruins President Cam Neely took issue with a question from the Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont that was critical of Boston’s scouting team and overall drafting record.
“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…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. [It all] goes back to 2015 and it was really unfair to Don. By the time Don got hired, it was late May, the 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?’ And, you know, look, these are things you try to learn from other picks throughout 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. 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 [before this past June]. So have we been perfect? No. Can we be better? Yes.”
Neely, of course, is referring to the 2015 NHL Draft when the Bruins accumulated three picks in the middle of the first round, tried to trade up and then ended up missing on two of those picks (Jakub Zboril and Zach Senyshyn) in a stacked first round that produced a ton of impact NHL players taken after Boston’s selections. And the B’s have produced NHL players like Ryan Lindgren, Trent Frederic, Brandon Carlo, Jeremy Lauzon and Dan Vladar that are now playing elsewhere in the league.
The good news for the Bruins is that the organization did not rank last in the NHL in this summer’s pipeline rankings, and instead finished at 20th overall while moving toward the middle of the pack. Here’s the Athletic’s quick summation with Hagens as the top overall prospect, and Fraser Minten, Dans Locmelis, Will Moore and Dean Letourneau rounding out the top-5 prospects in the system:
“Recently, Boston was back-to-back at the 32 spot in the pipeline rankings. A couple of years later, with some non-late first-round picks developing well, and especially after drafting James Hagens, its system is now respectable. Outside of Hagens, though, there isn’t much in the system that has upper half of the lineup potential.”
DANS LOCMELIS OVERTIME WINNER 🚨 pic.twitter.com/VT7plIN3iY
— Providence Bruins (@AHLBruins) April 13, 2025
Anybody who observed last month’s development camp noted that the Bruins had a higher level of talent out on the ice than in recent summers, so the puck prognosticator evaluations are jiving with what hockey eyeballs are seeing on the ice as well. Some of those players like Minten, Locmelis and Matt Poitras will likely pay dividends for the Black and Gold this season as NHL roster spots turn over to younger, hungrier skaters, but it will likely take at least a couple of seasons before Hagens, Letourneau and Moore begin making a sizeable impact for the Black and Gold.
Still, the Bruins can feel the energetic, eye-opening influx of young talent into their system just as everybody has noticed it.
“Not to knock other years, but yeah…for sure,” said Bruins Player Development Director Adam McQuaid, when asked if this summer’s prospect group was perhaps the most skilled that Boston has had in a while. “It’s definitely a younger group and the younger players really seem to be more skilled at a younger age now. It’s a skilled group and it’s really exciting to have so many guys that have some of that natural ability.”
Now comes the challenge of developing those players into viable NHL products, but that’s something the B’s have shown they can do in the past with undrafted college free agents and diamond-in-the-rough AHL players. The tough part is identifying those players in their teenage years and that’s clearly something the Bruins have stepped up and done better with in the last few seasons, and they have the pipeline ranking improvement to show for it.
