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In Harry Sinden’s days as GM, that led to fans calling local sports talk radio with incessant pleas of, “Get us a snipah, Harry!”
Sweeney played on many of those just-one-sniper-away teams, but that 40- or 50-goal guy never came walking through that door. If only the exercise were as easy as calling talk radio and landing said snipah for a pair of AHLers and a couple of fourth-round picks. (Bobby Lu from Stoneham, you’re next!)
In the past, Sweeney has taken dramatic swings, especially with the 2018 acquisition of Rick Nash, and in 2023, his biggest haul of all, when he added Tyler Bertuzzi, Dmitri Orlov, and Garnet Hathaway to a roster well on its way to a historic 65-12-5 finish.
In both instances, they were artful, prudent, high-end deals, though the playoff payoff fell miles short of projections. Nash’s career essentially came to its end with the concussion he sustained days after his arrival on Causeway Street. The 2023 trio largely performed as advertised, but … the dream vanished in the Round 1 loss to the Panthers. Come July, all three signed elsewhere as unrestricted free agents. The rental fee: a half-dozen draft picks, including a pair of first-rounders.
League-wide, the focus this week will be on the Rangers and what asset(s) GM Chris Drury will relinquish amid his publicly-stated franchise reset. Drury moved Artemi Panarin to the Kings on the eve of the Olympic break. He still could deal Vinny Trocheck (now with an Olympic gold medal) and/or Mika Zibanejad. Highly unlikely both centers will be in New York as of Friday eve.
Of the two, the 32-year-old Trocheck has the requisite grind in his game that the Bruins covet. He was considered one of Team USA GM Bill Guerin’s curious picks for Olympus, but he performed to perfection as a dogged checker, helping the Yanks go an airtight 17 for 17 on the penalty kill. Improving the PK topped coach Marco Sturm’s “to do” list as the Bruins returned to business Thursday night.
Trocheck, per PuckPedia, has three more years on a deal that carries a $5.625 million average annual value, a number the Bruins could fold into their payroll with little pain. The rising salary cap number is expected to jump some $8.5 million next season to $104 million.
Andrew Peeke was not one of the six Bruins defensemen in uniform upon return to play. He is on course to be an unrestricted free agent July 1 (as is forward Viktor Arvidsson). Peeke could be moved, but odds are he remains. He has a right shot (always a premium), he fits well into a sixth-seventh blue liner role, and his value as insurance back there for a potential playoff run exceeds what draft pick some team might offer in a swap.
Arvidsson also figures to be a deadline keep, and don’t be surprised if Sweeney locks him in for another 2-3 years. Sturm loves the “Little Weasel” and he’s shown some goal-scoring pop of late.
With Marco Sturm behind the bench, the Bruins are back in the playoff hunt.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
RELATIVE CALM
Sturm appreciates current position
Marco Sturm, who was coaching in the AHL for the Kings’ affiliate in Ontario, Calif. this time last season, recently alluded to what it had to be like here just 12 months ago when the Bruins were fading fast in the standings in the lead up to the March deadline.
These are markedly different times and circumstances. The Bruins own a playoff spot today, the first-year coach noting that he is “just happy we are in that position right now,” with his club in the playoff picture and things in relative “calm.”
“You guys know it better than I do,” he said recently to a small media gaggle in Brighton, “if your team is not going good, you almost see it coming, it’s going to be wholesale [changes]. And I don’t expect that to happen because we are in a good position.
“I don’t even think about [Friday’s deadline] too much. I try to do my job here and work with the guys who are here every day.”
More than 20 years ago, Sturm found out firsthand the unpredictable nature of the business and how abruptly a pro athlete’s life can change when he was moved from San Jose to Boston in the Joe Thornton trade.
On the evening of Nov. 30, 2005, he was on the ice in Dallas with his Sharks, readying for faceoff against the Stars. Sturm was 27 at the time and the Sharks, for whom he had played for seven-plus seasons, had lost nine in a row.
Any sense then that something wicked was about to come his way?
“Nothing,” mused Sturm, recalling the night. “Nothing, and I got called in from the warm-up. That’s how bad it was. My first trade and I’m thinking, ‘Uh … what’s just happening,’ right?”
Sturm was traded two more times during his NHL career and played for a total of four more teams after the Bruins. He became well accustomed to the vagaries and mental challenges of hockey here one day, hockey somewhere else the next.
“After the trade [from San Jose], I kind of learned the business side of it,” he said. “And after that, when I got traded, it always [is bad], but I realized, when you get older, it’s a business, right?”
And “for sure,” noted Sturm, that experience has shaped his thinking around the trade deadline, influenced what advice he could be called on to offer one day — perhaps this week? — to a player under his charge who suddenly has been dealt out of town.
“It just helps,” he said of his experience, “because I know how it feels. I know, toward the deadline, the games, whatever it is, I’ve been in their shoes. It definitely helps to calm things down and just focus — because they’re still here and hopefully everyone will still be here afterward.”
Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy and Team USA needed a postgame bouncer after winning gold in Milan.Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
ETC.
Once FBI boss Kash Patel was invited into the Team USA locker room in Milan last Sunday, and began swilling beer and beating his chest like some hockey machismo tough guy, it was only going to go downhill.
Note to future USA Hockey management: Park a bouncer at the door if ever there’s a next history-making moment. Patel took a signature Olympic moment — albeit one a distant second to the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” at Lake Placid — and rendered the tableau a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Think: John Belushi in his prime as Patel, only Belushi assuredly would have crushed the empty beer can on his head after draining the 12 ounces.
Faster than a Connor McDavid breakaway, President Trump was on the phone, with everyone in the US dressing room laughing and scratching, rightly celebrating their great three-on-three triumph over the Canadians.
(Aside: sorting out Olympic gold and silver with play reduced to three-on-three shinny is akin to the Masters running off to a par 3 course — Savannah Azaleas GC? — for the sudden-death tiebreaker. I mean, really? Cutting 40 percent of the skating stock after 60 minutes of savoring five-on-five is the definition of watering down the whiskey.)
Trump, ever the opportunistic showman, immediately offered the freshly-minted gold medalists a command performance two nights later at his State of the Union address. Of course they accepted. Anyone in that moment of exuberance would have done exactly the same — especially with the sycophantic Patel (“OK, Boss!’) firing them up. USA player pride ran longer and wider than the Mississippi in that moment.
I find it impossible to fault a bunch of young kids, including the smattering of adults among them, for their eagerness to meet the president and hoist their medals up the flagpole in D.C. They were baited and hooked — and promptly turned into political props in the august House chamber of the US Capitol.
It was also in that fevered moment Sunday that Trump made his lame, adolescent joke about having to invite the USA women to D.C. on Tuesday, making it sound unsavory, a burden. The boys in goggles and gold medals yukked it up over that. Huge, disrespectful fail on their part.
But I’ll give ’em all a pass there, too, again because of the emotions in the moment and the bet here that not everyone understood Trump’s joke or how he made the US women sound “less than.” We all know a lot of what Trump says is difficult to understand for a lot of Americans, only a few of whom ever won an Olympic hockey gold medal.
Oh, if only one of them had the nerve and decency in that moment to say, “Mr. President, sir … maybe you wanna take that back, please? We’re all on the same team here.”
I’m going to hold to the belief that, had they heard Trump clearly, understood his adolescent attempt at humor for what it was, at least one of them would have stood up and respectfully pushed back. That’s generally the hockey ethos.
On Thursday in Boston, USA defensemen Charlie McAvoy and Zach Werenski, in town with his Blue Jackets playing McAvoy’s Bruins, both said they regretted how the team handled it in the moment, acknowledging their friends deserved better. Good on them. It took a while, but they got it.
The women declined Trump’s invite, noting respectfully in their RSVP that they had a number of professional and academic conflicts. Like they displayed during their two weeks on ice, their touch was perfection.
Had someone on the men’s side thought it through later Sunday, or Monday morning, they should have graciously declined, too.
Most of them, unlike the women, have multimillion dollar contracts that they set aside for the Games. The NHL, shut down for three weeks, was poised to restart play some 72 hours after the final horn in Milan. Sixteen of the league’s 32 teams faced off the night after SOTU. Maggie, it really was time for all these guys to be back at school.
Five members of the USA men’s squad opted out of the SOTU invite: Kyle Connor (Jets), Jake Guentzel (Lightning), Brock Nelson (Avalanche), Jake Oettinger (Stars), and Jackson Lacombe (Ducks). Good on those guys, whatever the reason(s) they offered for skipping out of the D.C. circus and getting back to their day jobs. Amid the emotionally charged group-think of the moment, it could not have been easy to say no. They returned with medals in hand, dignity intact.
The protracted, sordid mess around Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia network has yet to implicate anyone involved with the NHL at any level. During the Olympics, however, it did lead Casey Wasserman to place his high-end talent agency up for sale after some of his prurient correspondence 20-plus years ago with Ghislaine Maxwell became public.
One of the agency’s properties is Wasserman Hockey, which includes a sizable roster of agents who’ve negotiated contracts over the years for scores of NHLers, including Oilers star Connor McDavid (repped by Judd Moldaver) and US gold medalist Auston Matthews (another Moldaver client). Later in his career, Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask was repped by Markus Lehto, another agent under the WH umbrella.
As the weekend approached, Wasserman’s agency remained up for sale. It’s a distressed, now stigmatized property because of the fetid Epstein stench.
The challenge will be to find someone to pony up fair value for it at a time when any connection with Epstein and/or Maxwell, his convicted and jailed accomplice in exploiting underage women, has led to job loss and shame around the world (Exhibit A: the ex-British royal formally known as Prince Andrew). To date, only Maxwell has been jailed (beyond the late Epstein’s initial light sentence).
The toxicity around Epstein no doubt will lead some NHL players to sever business ties with their Wasserman Hockey-related reps. Both agency and agent would still have fair claim to their cut of existing deals. The potential rolling cost, to both agency and individual agents, would be the loss of future contracts and endorsement deals.
The old adage in the stock market is beware the falling knife (trying to time when best to purchase a stock in steep decline). Right now, Wasserman Hockey is the falling knife, with prospective buyers left to wonder what price, if any, they’re willing to pay to get their hands on it.
After returning to Boston, the three Olympic gold medalists spoke to the press about the Winter Olympics and the rest of the PWHL season.
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com.