Neely hopes to extend Sweeney; fate of Cassidy will be in hands of GM

BOSTON — Bruins president Cam Neely said on Thursday that, with the blessing of the Jacobs family, he is in the process of working a contract extension for general manager Don Sweeney.

“I started talking with Charlie and Mr. (Jeremy) Jacobs about extending Don, so that’s my plan to do that. I’m going sit down with Don in the next day or two and hopefully hammer something out,” Neely said.

And will coach Bruce Cassidy be back? Well, that will be Sweeney’s call, said Neely.

Speaking in his annual end-of-season press conference, Neely gave his reason for holding off extending Sweeney until now, with his deal about to run out.

“To be honest, I really wanted to see how the year went,” Neely said. “We had a lot of changes in the last offseason, so I just really wanted to see how that played. Obviously you get January, February, March, you get really good months for us. I thought the team came together. We had a lot of depth. And I was happy with what he did at the deadline.”

Neely does not believe Sweeney was hamstrung by being in a possible lameduck situation. And what Sweeney was able to do in the recent months and weeks bear that out. He traded a first-round pick to obtain Hampus Lindholm, and then signed him to a massive eight-year, $52 million contract extension. And this week, he signed Jakub Zboril, who was set to become a Group 6 free agent, to a two-year extension worth $1.1375 million a season.

“We actually talked about it and he said, ‘I have no problem going into my last year (of his contract) as GM,’ ” Neely said. “‘I’ll continue to work the way I work. I’ll work as hard as I can to improve the club.’ So he was very professional in that regard.”

As for Cassidy, the situation seems a little more tenuous. While he praised much of what Cassidy has done since taking over 2017, he does believe there needs to be a strategic shift in how the team plays, echoing Cassidy’s own words — at least in part — from the coach’s Tuesday presser when he said they may need to sacrifice a little bit of their trademark defensive play to create more offense.

“Bruce is a fantastic coach,” Neely said. “He’s brought a lot of success to this organization. I like him as a coach, so we’ll see where it goes. But I do think we need some changes. And I think Bruce a couple days ago alluded to that, so we’ll see where that goes.”