Neely has big plans for B’s
Important to get more physical up front
LAS VEGAS — Bruins president Cam Neely was in Sin City for yesterday’s NHL Board of Governors meeting and he stopped to chat with a couple of reporters before the league’s awards show last night, weighing in on a number of subjects.
Neely will head from here to Dallas for the draft tomorrow and Saturday. He expects there’ll be some player movement on the trade front, based on some of the pre-draft talk.
“You look at some of the teams where a couple of owners have come out, whether it’s Carolina or Minnesota, where they want someone looking at the team with fresh eyes and look at the roster differently. Carolina is saying they’ve had players there for four, five, six years and haven’t gotten to the playoffs,” said Neely. “Whether things materialize, who knows? But there seems to be, at least from a chatter perspective, there’s an open-for-business (sign) on a few teams.”
How hard the Bruins go at those trade-minded teams in the hopes of landing a player remains to be seen. There has been much speculation about the B’s being interested in Hurricanes defenseman Noah Hanifin. Neely had said in his season-ending press conference that he wouldn’t mind seeing the team get bigger on the left side of the defense.
But yesterday he sounded more interested in adding size at forward if that opportunity arose.
“From our back end perspective, even with Torey (Krug) and Matt (Grzelcyk), we have some good size and physicality back there,” said Neely. “In the forward group, we have (David) Backes who gets in there and plays physical. But other than that, we’ve got guys who’ll compete hard, but if we could find someone with a little more meat on the bones . ... But you need guys who can skate. If you can’t skate, it’s difficult to get in on the contact.”
After the Board of Governors meeting, commissioner Gary Bettman announced the salary cap would be between $79.5 million to $80 million, pending NHLPA approval. That would give the Bruins approximately $12 million in cap space.
They’ve still got internal work to do. They need to re-sign unrestricted free agent goalie Anton Khudobin (or his replacement) and restricted free agent forward Sean Kuraly, who shouldn’t cost quite as much as Grzelcyk, who recently inked a two-year deal worth $1.4 million a year.
That should give the B’s some room to make a run at a certain big bodied winger, 35-year-old Russian Ilya Kovalchuk, for whom general manager Don Sweeney has expressed a desire. The question is whether the B’s are ready to jump into a market in which they’ll most likely overpay. And next summer could be a doozy for the B’s, when Charlie McAvoy, Brandon Carlo, Danton Heinen and Ryan Donato are all scheduled to be RFAs.
“We’ve talked about the free agent pool for a couple of years now,” Neely said. “Generally, what happens is you overcommit to both term and dollars. That’s just the way it is. Rarely do younger players come up and you say ‘I’m going to go for broke here.’ And with Charlie coming up and Carlo coming up, those are guys we look to keep in our organization for years, so we have to factor those contracts.”
That said, Neely added he doesn’t think the B’s need to shed salary, even with the costly summer of 2019 looming. Both Backes and David Krejci have been subject of the usual internet trade rumors/speculation, but Neely said neither have been approached about waiving their nomovement clauses.
“With the cap being a little higher than anticipated, that helps,” Neely said. “Then we’ll see what happens in the course of next season and see where the cap goes. But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of really managing the cap and forecasting what the guys coming up may demand in contracts based on comps around the league. I think we’re in pretty good shape right now and moving forward for next year.”
Bruins notes
The Bruins will have to be ready for battle at the first drop of the puck this fall.
The NHL released the 2018-19 home openers yesterday and the full schedule will be released today. The Bruins will open on the road against the Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals on their bannerraising night at the Verizon Center on Wednesday, Oct. 3. They’ll go right into a back-to-back, playing the Sabres, and presumably No. 1 draft pick Rasmus Dahlin, in Buffalo Oct. 4.
The B’s home opener is Monday, Oct. 8 against Ottawa in the annual Columbus Day matinee.
The B’s will also help Edmonton open its home schedule Oct. 18, some 15 days after the B’s and Caps kick off the season.