The Bruins farm system has been slowly turning over in a big way the last couple of years, and this summer has been one of those seminal periods with a great deal of change coming for next season and beyond.
The most obvious changes in Providence were head coach Ryan Mougenel leaving for an assistant coaching spot with the Vancouver Canucks and being replaced by former P-Bruins captain Trent Whitfield. And longtime P-Bruins forwards Fabian Lysell and Georgii Merkulov both exiting the organization for fresh starts with the Colorado Avalanche after never quite making it to Boston.
It also extends to veteran P-Bruins forwards like Riley Tufte and Patrick Brown exiting Providence in what should lead to a much younger AHL group this season, with players like Riley Duran, Michael Callahan, Dans Locmelis, Ivan Ivan and Simon Zajicek, among others, leading the way with the P-Bruins.
But this weekend was also a big turnover in another way as a whopping three Bruins draft picks will not be signed by the organization with Oskar Jelvik (fifth round pick in 2021), Mason Langenbrunner (fifth round pick in 2020) and goalie Phillip Svedeback (fourth round pick in 2021) and became free agents at the Aug. 15 deadline for drafted players coming out of the college ranks. Combining that with the trade of the rights to Andre Gasseau (seventh round pick in 2021) when it was clear he wasn’t going to sign with the Bruins as well, and it’s a clear admission that it was time to move on from an entire Bruins organizational chapter.
“You're watching Providence play [this past season] and identifying the players that may be able to make the jump to help us next year. I think the job that our player development guys did with James [Hagens] this year in the amount of time they spent at Boston College to get him ready, and to make the jump [to the NHL] is important," said Don Sweeney. 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 [when he coached in the AHL] with players that were going to graduate and go through ebbs and flows in terms of where their own [game was]… it's not a linear path for any player. 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 hopefully the progression is there. That's the merging part that we're all trying to do [at the NHL level]. And our guys are out communicating with our next prospects and the guys that we're hopefully going to implement into our lineups down the future, and they've done a really good job.”
The good news is that the new wave of young Bruins prospects and young pros at the AHL level feel like they hold a brighter future, and it starts with