Bruins lack resources to be big players on trade market, and that's just fine

BOSTON — It’s Thursday night in Boston, and the Bruins are in the midst of playing a game at TD Garden that evokes the question: What do you give a team that has it all? 

At some point between David Pastrnak opening the scoring 44 seconds in and closing it with 22 seconds to go to cap a hat trick that cements the Bruins’ 5-2 win over the Colorado Avalanche, it becomes clear the most obvious answer is the right one — nothing.

Not that the Bruins have been perfect through their first 44 games in the post-Patrice Bergeron/David Krejci era. They’ve just been arguably the best team in the NHL, with a 71.6-points percentage punctuated by this current seven-game point streak that’s brought them closer and closer to meeting their own excessively high standard.

Just how close are they?

Of this little three-game winning streak over St. Louis, New Jersey and Colorado, Bruins coach Jim Montgomery was unequivocal in his assessment.

“I think the last three games might be the best three games we’ve had all year, even including the start,” he said after Thursday’s domination of the Avs.

Back in October, it was Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark covering up the holes we all expected would be there when two of the steadiest centremen we’ve seen in the NHL over the last two decades simultaneously retired. 

The Bruins’ special teams took care of the rest. 

But now? Swayman remains a dominant force, Ullmark is likely to return to being one after a nine-day absence with a lower-body injury, the fifth-best power play and fourth-best penalty kill in the league continue to dominate and suffocate opponents from game to game, and every other aspect of play appears to be falling into place. 

Players at all positions are also contributing. Especially the centremen, who are casting serious doubt on the notion the Bruins have a pothole to patch there.

Charlie Coyle, who fed Pastrnak two of his three goals for his 18^th and 19^th assists on the season Thursday, hasn’t looked remotely out of place in the middle of the top line. Pavel Zacha, who’s played wing at times recently, picked up his 26^th point of the season from the centre position against Colorado. 

That’s where Morgan Geekie played on Thursday, bumping centre Trent Frederik over for most of the shifts, and certainly the one on which he set up Jakub Lauko’s first goal of the season. And Jesper Boquist did his job well enough on this night, winning 50 per cent of his faceoffs and helping the Bruins’ fourth line take a 50 per cent share of the shot attempts at five-on-five.

Not that such a performance guarantees his spot in the lineup on Saturday, with another centre eager to draw back in.

Ah, the luxury of depth…

“Internally, we don’t worry about our middle position,” said Montgomery. “We’ve got five to six. (Matthew) Poitras wasn’t even in the lineup, you know. We have six guys that we feel can all play the centre position and play it well. That versatility makes it really good when it comes to matchups and who you’re playing.”

It also quiets the narrative that the Bruins might bend over backwards to get, say, Sean Monahan out of Montreal.

Not that they couldn’t use the six-foot-two veteran of over 700 NHL games, who notched his 28^th point of the season in a Canadiens loss in Ottawa while they were putting the carbon fibre to the Avs. They could do worse than adding a player who’s won 57 per cent of 655 faceoffs taken to a group that’s ranked 19^th in the category so far this season.

But do the Bruins need Monahan? Probably nowhere near as much as the top-heavy Avalanche do, and probably not at all.

The idea that they’d scramble to move players or prospects to obtain the draft capital to acquire him — or anyone else like him — seems farfetched. With no 2024 picks until the fourth round, none in the first two rounds of 2025, and no incentive to dish off 2026 picks, they’ll need to eventually start restocking a cupboard that’s been raided to fuel contending teams over the past few years. That’s essentially what they’d need to do to be big players in the market.

Instead, the capped-out Bruins might not do much at all, other than nibble at the scraps of the trade heap for some bargain-bin variety depth.

It would hardly be catastrophic if they did nothing at all between now and Mar. 8, because it doesn’t appear as though they need to. Especially with their recent uptick in play.

Hey, that could change.

Jake DeBrusk, who had a goal and an assist against Colorado, knows that.

“We’ve got half a year left, and there’s a lot of things that can happen in half a year,” the 27-year-old, who’s in his seventh season in Boston, said. 

But he also said the Bruins are happy with their position — they were in first place in the NHL while he was conducting post-game interviews — and added “We’ve earned it.”

Now, it’s just about continuing. 

“As (Zdeno Chara) always said, we have to stay with the program,” DeBrusk said. “Understand how we play and our identity, and we’ll be good.”

The Bruins look like they’ll be better than just “good” doing that.