The Boston Bruins basked in a lot of victories, both moral and literal, during this past season when they pushed to 100 points during the regular season and then made it back to the Stanley Cup playoffs after a painful hiatus during the previous season. But the 2024-25 dumpster fire of a hockey campaign and the obvious talent gap that the Black and Gold faced this past season can be traced back to a period of fallow drafts from 2018-2021 that featured first-round busts, few NHL players produced and a handful of draft picks that never even signed with the organization.
Much like the 2019 Stanley Cup Final version of the B’s were paying the price for a subpar 2015 draft class, these current talent-challenged B’s rosters are paying the price for a number of draft classes that were pretty much failures over a long four-year period of futility.
With former first-round Fabian Lysell’s days in the Bruins organization likely numbered at this point, the 2021 NHL Draft class for Boston looks like a total and complete loss for the Black and Gold. Oskar Jellvik (fifth round pick) signed last week with Rogle BK in the Swedish Elite League after an injury-plagued career at Boston College and will start his pro career in Europe rather than North America.
Brett Harrison, Owen Pederson, Ryan Mast, Drew Bavaro, Chris Pelosi, Beckett Hendrickson, Oskar Jellvik & Matthieu Caron won Bruins Development Camp 3-on-3 tourney. Unfortunately it looked like Jellvik hurt his knee when he was hauled down by Loke Johansson in the trophy game 🏆 pic.twitter.com/HYCDi5OiBK
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) July 4, 2024
“Oskar will fit in very well with us. He comes with high drive where he competes in every situation, good game sense where he finds the right spaces both with and without the puck,” said Rogle GM Hampus Sjöström of the 23-year-old, who finished with 23 goals and 75 points in a little over 100 games with the Eagles. “Coming from a couple of injury-ridden seasons but where he has now got his body back on track and we will help him unlock the high potential we know he possesses.”
Providence College netminder Phillip Svedeback (fourth round pick) does not look like he’s going to sign with the Bruins, either, after Boston signed undrafted Merrimack goalie Max Lungren to a contract earlier this spring.
And others like Brett Harrison (third round pick) and Ryan Mast (sixth round pick) have already been traded out of the organization after failing to establish themselves even at the AHL level.
Seventh-round pick Andre Gasseau is also likely not to sign with the Bruins and instead opt for free agency in August after completing his fourth year at Boston College, reportedly because the Bruins did not want to guarantee him NHL action at the end of this past season.
2021 7th rounder Andre Gasseau still not signed, and with word going around that he might not and could push free agency on August 15th per @MarkDivver. The Bruins 2021 Draft
— Robert Chalmers (@IvanIvanlvan) March 30, 2026
now looks like
Fabian Lysell: Providence for 4th year
Brett Harrison: Providence for 3 years, then…
Fellow seventh-rounder Ty Gallagher is still with the organization and had seven goals and 20 points with the P-Bruins last season.
In fact, there are a number of players picked over a yearly draft class span from 2018-2021 (Quin Olson, Dustyn McFaul, Axel Andersson, Curtis Hall, Matias Mantykivi) that either stayed in Europe, couldn’t establish themselves at the AHL or never graduated from the ECHL in a particularly dry spell for Boston’s scouting and drafting arm of the organization.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are only three established NHL players developed over that same time period, with Mason Lohrei, Johnny Beecher, and Jakub Lauko to show for four years of drafting and development work.
Lohrei has turned into an emerging NHL top 4 defenseman that may be traded this summer, Beecher was lost on waivers to Calgary this past season after never living up to his first-round draft status and Lauko is back playing hockey in Czechia after bouncing between the Bruins and Wild over the last few seasons.
This is one of the big reasons why the Boston Bruins talent pipeline was ranked as the NHL’s worst in back-to-back season by The Athletic as recently as two years ago.
The only Bruin on Corey Pronman’s list of the NHL’s top 23-and-younger talent is Fabian Lysell — and he's Mr. Irrelevant.@FlutoShinzawa has four reasons Boston is last in the pipeline rankings: https://t.co/kC2RRycNuJ pic.twitter.com/tVjpt6SqgC
— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) August 30, 2022
Certainly, some allowances should be made for those draft classes that played their formative hockey years during the COVID epidemic years that made for very limited scout viewing, and it feels like a lot of teams “missed” on draft picks during that stretch. But the Bruins don’t have a lot of wiggle room there when they were struggling to produce NHL players for years prior to that.
Bruins GM Don Sweeney bristled at media questions pointing to Boston’s player development as “a failure”, but it’s true that the drafting part of the “draft and development” lifeblood of any organization has gone through some rough periods for the B’s over the last 11 years under current management.
“We would not view our player development as a failure at all. I think our guys have done a really, really good job all the way, as it's been passed along. You need to continue to implement younger players. We've traded away, in several years, players that are still playing in the National Hockey League, impact players in the National Hockey League,” said Sweeney, referencing players like Ryan Lindgren, Dan Vladar and others that have established themselves in other NHL locales. “So albeit, we're trying to, to David's [Pastrnak] point, we are trying to be aggressive when we can be, and also identifying doesn't matter if that’s [Marat] Khusnutdinov, and it doesn't matter when and where players are drafted. It's a matter of whether or not they can help your hockey club.
“There are opportunities there that we need to continue to leverage and take advantage of across the board in every one of our players. But Marco [Sturm] had an eye towards that. He had patience of what was going on in Ontario with players that were going to graduate and go through ebbs and flows in terms of where their own… it's not a linear path for any player. And I think he's got a really good eye for when a player is able to grasp what he's trying to do systematically and allow him to make some mistakes, but also, hopefully the progression is there. And that's the merging part that we're all trying to do.”
The Bruins have certainly hit in other areas to make up for it, where minor league signings for players like Parker Wotherspoon, Cole Koepke, Justin Brazeau, Jonathan Aspirot, and Alex Steeves have made up for the draft shortcomings, as have trades for young NHLers like Marat Khusnutdinov. Those kinds of players have adequately filled the cracks organizationally, and a number of those players helped elevate Boston back into the playoffs last season.
But the hope is that a handful of those mid-round picks turn into longtime organizational players and core members of the team over a 5–10-year period, and that just hasn’t been the case in Boston.
The Bruins at least appear to have remedied some of their draft flaws with recent picks like James Hagens, Cooper Simpson, Elliott Groenewold, Dean Letourneau and Chris Pelosi in the last few NHL Draft classes, and with Will Zellers added through trade activity.
But with each Bruins prospect that hasn’t panned out from the 2021 draft class, that year, and the ones around it, look more and more like a complete loss amidst a period when the Bruins simply missed with their selections, regardless of what round, junior league, or country they were being selected from.
That’s an organizational failure that’s impossible to ignore for all the things they have done right over the last 16 or so months, or the good direction that things appear to be in at this point.