There are a lot of reasons why the Boston Bruins find themselves in the unusual position of not playing in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and staring at the possibility of having a top-five pick in the NHL Draft.
Poor drafting and player development are at or near the top of the list.
You can get away with bad drafting and development if you have a good veteran team, which the Bruins had for over a decade. But at some point it catches up to you, and for the Bruins, that reality came in the 2024-25 season as they sunk to the fifth-worst record in the league.
The Bruins could make a few fixes this summer to get back in the playoff mix next season, but for them to really compete for a Stanley Cup title over the long term, there has to be a much larger emphasis on drafting and player development.
The Bruins’ draft record over the last 10 years is not good. There’s little room for debate. In fact, since Don Sweeney took over as general manager in 2015, he has drafted only two impact players who are still on the roster: defenseman Charlie McAvoy and goaltender Jeremy Swayman.
Only one forward drafted by Sweeney has scored 20-plus goals in a season — Jake DeBrusk — and he’s no longer on the roster. Only 10 of the 38 players drafted by the Bruins from 2017 through 2023 have played in an NHL game.
Despite the team’s lackluster draft and development history, Bruins president Cam Neely got pretty defensive when asked about it during Wednesday’s end-of-season press conference.
Here’s the exchange between Neely and The Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont:
Dupont: “Question on drafting and development, neither of them have really been up to expectations in my opinion.”
Neely: “Can you just elaborate on that, Kevin?”
Dupont: “The drafting?”
Neely: “Yep. Where we’ve picked, who we’ve picked and how it’s turned out.”
Dupont: “Well, where you’ve picked is not a lot of top 10 picks.”
Neely: “Not a lot of first-round picks.”
Dupont: “But ultimately, are those draft picks, have they developed and come on line the way you’ve wanted? If that’s the case, fine.”
Neely: “Well, obviously, you want to hit on all of your picks. The work the scouts do over the course of a year, they put in a lot of time and effort, they understand the players as best they can. We get the information from the scouts. Don ultimately ends up making the picks with information he gets from the scouts throughout the year.
“But I think our drafting and developing, the…