As Bruins enter daunting offseason, accountability seems to be in short supply (2025)

Bruins

"I share your disappointment, and frankly, embarrassment on how poorly things played out over the course of this season."

By Conor Ryan

April 27, 2025

7 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

The Bruins have plenty of work to do this summer when it comes to course-correcting a roster that plummeted into the cellar of the NHL standings in 2024-25.

As such, team CEO Charlie Jacobs seemingly struck the proper tone on Wednesday at the start of Boston’s post-mortem musings about a lost season on Causeway Street.

“We owe you a better team, and we aim to deliver a better team. I share your disappointment, and frankly, embarrassment on how poorly things played out over the course of this season, and I cannot thank you enough for your continued support,” Jacobs said.

“Let me be clear, the results from last season are absolutely unacceptable, and accountability has never been higher,” he later added.

Those comments could easily be brushed aside as the hollow platitudes usually doled out at these end-of-season pressers.

But such is the proper sentiment that should have been echoed throughout Wednesday’s hour-long press conference by a contrite Bruins front-office grouping before harping on the task of building up a new core.

It only took a few minutes for those themes of accountability to dissipate, with a presser ideally aimed at setting the tone for a decisive path forward instead devolving into a credential-validating discourse and dismissive barbs rooted in whataboutism.

Look no further than the valid commentary regarding Boston’s struggles in both drafting and developing young talent, a subject that rankled Neely on Wednesday.

As Neely noted, years correctly spent adhering to a “win-now” mindset relinquished years of draft capital — and the opportunity to replenish Boston’s dwindling prospect pipeline as franchise pillars like Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci grew older.

But when The Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont broached the subject of Boston’s lackluster drafting, Neely pushed back.

“Can you just elaborate on that, Kevin?” Neely said, adding: “Where we’ve picked and who we picked and how it’s turned out?”

“Well, where you’ve picked is not a lot of top 10 picks,” Dupont replied.

“Not a lot of first-round picks,” Neely countered.

“But ultimately, are those draft picks, have they developed and come on line the way you’ve wanted? If that’s the case, fine,” Dupont said.

Rather than harp on recent high-upside selections like Matt Poitras or Mason Lohrei, new additions like Fraser Minten, or opt to look ahead with what could be a top-five pick in the 2025 NHL Draft, Neely instead opted to pick at an old wound in the much-maligned 2015 Draft.

“I think our drafting and developing, the narrative there is a little off,” Neely said. “And it’s been going on for quite some time. It goes back to 2015. In 2015, it was really unfair to Don. By the time Don got hired it was late May, the draft was late June. He probably wasn’t thinking about being the general manager at the time.

“What Don did leading up to the draft to make the acquisitions he did with those picks, to get those three picks, I thought was really good. Then Don was trying to move up in the draft and 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’ve got three picks in a row.’”

After looking back on a night where Boston failed to acquire impact talent in one of the deepest drafts in league history, Neely once again stressed that the Bruins’ track record of developing NHLers is far better than what the narratives note.

“These are things you try to learn from,” Neely said. “Other picks after that, I think we’ve got a number of players, not necessarily with the Boston Bruins, that we have drafted that have played NHL hockey games. We have traded some of the picks and prospects to try and improve our club to win the Stanley Cup.

“The narrative — we’re not hitting on all our draft picks. No one is. You pick in the top 10, you better hit. We haven’t done that in quite some time. Have we been perfect? No. Can we be better? Yes.”

Of course, some of that argument about selecting prospects who have played NHL hockey games rings a bit hollow. Shouldn’t the focus be more on what said player does when they get to the NHL ranks, rather than just label any player with NHL service time as a “hit”?

So by extension, are draft picks like Jakob Forsbacka Karlsson (29 NHL games played) and Jack Studnicka (107 games) “hits”?

Trying to revisit the 2015 NHL Draft stands as a sunk-cost narrative for the Bruins at this point.

But what about the 2016 NHL Draft, where Boston used a second first-round pick (No. 26 overall) to take a player in Trent Frederic who then-director of amateur scouting Keith Gretzky immediately said was “not going to be a top-two-line guy.” Blues top-six center Jordan Kyrou was taken six picks later, followed by top-six winger Alex DeBrincat at No. 39.

There’s the 2017 NHL Draft, where Boston used the 18th overall pick to take another left-shot D in Urho Vaakanainen. Boston had already targeted several other left-shot blueliners in the top-two rounds in both the 2015 (Jakub Zboril, Jeremy Lauzon) and 2016 (Ryan Lindgren) drafts.

But even with Bergeron and Krejci both in their 30s by 2017, the Bruins once again placed a premium on defense with Vaakanainen. The next two picks? Two playmaking centers in Josh Norris at No. 19 and Robert Thomas (81 points in 70 games this season) at No. 20 overall.

Even 2019 stands as another example of the Bruins using first-round capital to target high-floor, bottom-six players like Johnny Beecher. A player who, yes, is an NHLer (130 games played), but also scored just one goal over his final 73 games of the season.

Identifying impact players in the later stages of the first round is a more daunting task than taking your pick with top-10 selections year in and year out. But it’s also not an impossible venture — as evidenced by players like Dallas’ Wyatt Johnston (No. 23 overall in 2021 – two picks after Fabian Lysell) or Washington’s Connor McMichael (No. 25 overall – 2019).

It’s a pointless exercise looking back at 2015. The Bruins’ top brass, in particular, shouldn’t keep on striking that raw nerve.

And yes, it should be expected for there to be a drought of homegrown talent when the team picked in the first round in just three of the last seven drafts.

Such as the cost of keeping a contention window open and doing everything a franchise can to put their current roster over the top. That’s more than fair. But to push back against the valid faults in their drafting and developing over that same stretch is … a choice, to be sure.

That was far from the only subject that either prompted terse retorts from Boston’s management or a lack of clarity.

On whether a head coach might be hesitant to accept the Bruins’ job offer — given the short shelf life afforded to bench bosses over the last few years?

“I’ll call you up and let you know if somebody turns it down, the invitation to interview for one of the most historic jobs in the National Hockey League,” Sweeney replied.

On the difference in accountability between a head coach and a GM/president?

“I think the shelf life of a head coach is significantly shorter than one of a general manager or a team president,” Jacobs said. “It’s the nature of the beast of the job. You can have players’ attention for a select window of time and then unfortunately, sometimes you lose it. It’s ours, it’s Don’s job to make sure that he’s got his hand on the pulse of whether or not the players have tuned out the head coach, and I feel he’s done a pretty good job of measuring that.”

As far as expectations for next season?

“I do feel, and we’ve spoken at great length about this, the team that we currently have healthy, with the additions we intend to make this summer, I anticipate that we will have a playoff team and play meaningful hockey at this time of year in 2026,” Jacobs said.

Neely added his own qualifier to those same expectations.

“The biggest thing for me,” Neely added, “is I don’t want everybody just to focus on making the playoffs. Yes, we do want to make the playoffs, but we have bigger goals in mind than just making the playoffs. It’s not just about getting in and getting bounced in round one. We’re here to understand that we have to build a team that’s going to compete for Stanley Cups.

“Don and his group have done it before. I have full confidence we can do it again. You know, the game is so fickle. We win in 2019 in Game 7 at home here, I don’t know what the conversations are externally after that. But, you know, I think it’s not just about getting into the playoffs here, it’s about winning.”

Neely’s right. The narrative would be different had the Bruins beat the Blues in Game 7.

Or had Sweeney and Co. had more time to craft their draft plans in 2015

Or had Boston kept itself off the ropes against the Panthers in April 2023.

But they didn’t.

And the sooner the Bruins stop harping at the past and revisit past missteps (and successes), the better the franchise will be for it as they try to focus on the future — and the sizable challenge that awaits.