While there was a lot of talk about the Boston Bruins still looking for a bona fide frontline, No. 1 center three years after the retirement of Patrice Bergeron, that is not the biggest need for the B’s headed into the offseason.
Instead, the Bruins need to focus their efforts on improving their back end after finishing middle of the pack in the NHL defensively during the regular season, and proving to be a hockey club in the playoffs that was not adept at breaking the puck out against the speedy pressure from the Buffalo Sabres in the postseason.
Certainly, they weren’t pulling any punches about it on the NHL Network during the first-round playoff series.
@LindsayBHockey on NHL Network: “Boston is not a good puck-moving team from the back end. You could see how dominant Buffalo’s forechecking was…Boston has a tough time defending. They are the worst breakout team in the NHL, by far. Their D-men are not adept at moving the puck”
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) April 20, 2026
Guys like minor league find Jonathan Aspirot, still-developing Mason Lohrei, and outgoing free agent Andrew Peeke were thrown into top 4 duty last season with varying results, but none of them felt like the long-term answer in that spot if the Bruins hope to build back into being a Stanley Cup contender.
From a short-term perspective, the Bruins are also going to need another top 4 defenseman-type at the start of the regular season now that Charlie McAvoy is facing a six-game suspension for his overhand, two-handed slash on Zach Benson at the end of their first-round playoff series. It was an ill-conceived move by McAvoy in terms of timing and long-term negative impact for the team, but the suspension is now in the books and the Bruins D-man’s window for appealing the decision with the league has expired as of this weekend.
Don Sweeney admitted at the end-of-season press conference that there are going to be “tweaks” to Marco Sturm’s man-to-man hybrid defensive zone coverage, and that the Bruins are more likely to mix in an aggressive forecheck with the neutral zone trap they employed at times last season. Essentially, the foundation has been laid for some significant philosophical changes the B’s made to their mindset in the D-zone and neutral zone last season, and now they can build on that beginning with training camp next season.
“You have to be able to defend, you’ve got to check up ice, you have to defend the neutral zone…the line rush side of things. We just made some decisions that we were going to counteract. We’re going to make it awfully difficult for teams to get through the neutral zone,” said Sweeney. “But the breakouts are part of that. If we’re not clean or coming out of our own end, you’re going to get secondary chances and offensive zone time that’s going to turn into breakdowns, mistakes or skilled players in this league will take advantage of space. So it’s a combination of all of the above.
“Marco [Sturm] identified the players that certainly fit his eye in playing a system, but he’s also all into, it’s not a full man-on-man as people describe. There’s a hybrid approach to things [in the D-zone], the neutral zone and being able to probably flip it around as we did in Game 5 [of the playoffs] to have a little more of an attack mentality. You just have to be built to be able to do that, and we have to deepen our skill set and our speed to be able to allow a coach to do that.”
The Bruins attempted to keep that skill set and their speed moving the puck when they attempted to trade for Swedish defenseman Rasmus Andersson ahead of the NHL trade deadline in a deal that reportedly had Lohrei, Matt Poitras and a first-round pick headed to Calgary. Now Andersson is moving toward unrestricted free agency on July 1 after posting seven goals and 17 points in 33 games for Vegas while averaging 21:41 of ice time, and a playoff where he’s been mostly quiet offensively while averaging over 23 minutes of ice time per game and playing with a positive plus/minus for a team headed to the Western Conference Finals.
There’s also 30-year-old Darren Raddysh coming off the best NHL season of his career with 22 goals and 70 points on the back end. He’s not a slick puck mover, but he is a guy with a howitzer shot that plays big-time minutes after leading the Bolts with over 26 minutes of ice time per game during their playoff series.
So there will be big-time options in free agency for a Bruins team that has $16 million in cap space and a clear need to form a “big four” on the back end, with McAvoy, Hampus Lindholm, and Nikita Zadorov already shouldering their share of the load.
There is also a chance the Bruins will be
