The Boston Bruins have looked flat in most of their games throughout the 2024-25 regular season. But if you ask the most prominent figures on the team, it goes back even further than that.
Training camp is being pointed to as a reason the Bruins have gotten off to a surprisingly slow start, which ultimately got Jim Montgomery fired as head coach. For various reasons, the B’s didn’t have as strong of a camp as they’d hoped, and GM Don Sweeney believes it was something of a catalyst for the team looking somewhere between sluggish and totally lifeless in many of their games.
“I don’t want to be too specific and too critical on any one singular player, I just felt our camp was flatline across the board,” Sweeney said during a Wednesday press conference. “And to me, that was the first troubling sign, but again, people coming in, but we were flat all the way through training camp. Whether or not they thought it was going to be easy, and the guys had really good last year would come out, and it would just fall in place.
“This league is incredibly humbling if you have that approach to the game, and it’ll expose you in a hurry and that’s sort of what’s happened to our group and the fact that it doesn’t come easy, and you have to work harder as a result of it. You have to have more structure in place to fall back on success. That’s what our fan base expects.”
Prior to those comments, Sweeney did mention captain Brad Marchand and alternate captain David Pastrnak as players who didn’t have ideal summers. Marchand missed most of camp as he recovered from multiple offseason surgeries, while Pastrnak “didn’t have a very good training camp as well” and “might not have had the offseason he wanted,” as Sweeney put it.
“It obviously wasn’t good enough, not up to our standards,” Pastrnak said, when asked about camp. “It’s November, and we still haven’t gotten there. So, we have a look of work to do. But, we think we’re gonna get better as a group. We’re gonna become more mature and the compete level is gonna go a lot higher than it has been until now.”
Goaltender Jeremy Swayman, meanwhile, was the Bruins’ most notable absence in camp, as he sat out all of it due to a tough, sometimes-public contract negotiation. NHL insider Elliotte Friedman, on his latest “32 Thoughts” podcast – which in fact came out before the Bruins lost to the Blue Jackets and fired Montgomery – alluded to “lingering hard feelings” between Swayman and other members of the team/organization over the way he handled his contract.
After the loss to Columbus, Swayman himself acknowledged that he has some repairs to make, both with his game and with his teammates.
“I think the biggest thing that I lost out on [missing camp] was this group, and I’m really trying to engulf just being in the room again and being a leader, and I want my play to speak for that,” Swayman said. “I need to step up, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been a good sign that the fourth line looked like the best of the group. They tried to begin the season with a top line of Pavel Zacha, Elias Lindholm, and Pastrnak, and they strung a few good practices together. Defenseman Nikita Zadorov seemed like a strong addition. But the team’s overall performance obviously didn’t inspire much confidence in Sweeney, or even Montgomery, at the time.
With all this in mind, it’s hard to believe that the Bruins will flip a switch under interim head coach Joe Sacco, and all of a sudden explode offensively and completely button everything up defensively. They can’t take a time machine back to September and come back to the week before Thanksgiving having had a good, healthy camp (I don’t think).
There should be a burst of energy and focus from the team, now that they’ve gotten another coach fired. But they still have a lot of work to do cleaning up a stink that started in camp, and lingered into this week.
