Boston Bruins Mid Season Prospect Update Part Four: The Conclusion

Part One: Prospect Chances

Part Two: Prospect Production

Part Three: Providence Bruins

This is the conclusion to my four-part series looking at Boston Bruins prospects. If you missed the first three parts, you can find them at the links above.

Much has been written about the Bruins prospect pool and it hasn’t been kind to them. But you all know that if you aren’t picking in the top third of the first round of the NHL Entry Draft, finding top-notch players is near impossible. But not totally impossible.

Even without those high picks, the Bruins still managed to find their franchise defenceman in Charlie McAvoy, their franchise forward in David Pastrnak and their franchise goaltender in Jeremy Swayman. They also have promising young rookies in Mason Lohrei and Matthew Poitras beginning to carve out their NHL careers.

Not only have they lacked high picks, they’ve traded many picks to challenge for a cup over the years but, they’ve been able to attract undrafted free agents that have some promise like Brandon Bussi and Georgii Merkulov. John Farinacci may not be a top line player, but there is a lot of promise with him as a middle six player at the NHL level. And we haven’t even touched on Fabian Lysell.

When you dive into team prospect pools, the natural tendency is to look at the top end players. Naturally, you need those guys. But my motto is you have to fill all positions.

The problem is that many folks seem to think that every prospect needs to be a high-end prospect and that’s not always the case. John Beecher is a classic example. You need to fill out a full roster and if you can find the top players or near the top players for each of those roles, then you are doing something right. Trevor Kuntar may not be a top-6 forward but he sure looks like he can play in the bottom-6 at this point. The 89^th pick in 2020 Draft does not have to be better than Alexis Lafreniere or Quinton Byfield or Tim Stutzle to be a successful pick. He just has to be better than Jean-Luc Foudy or Wyatt Kaiser or Alex Laferriere. The trick is to win as many of the later rounds as possible, like the 4^th round in 2017 with Swayman.

There are many different models that measure success in drafting. One is games played and that is usually the model accepted in the hockey industry. The Athletic recently broke down the drafts from 2007 to present. Their data found your Boston Bruins the fourth best drafting team in that period. That, along with other things I place value in has me raise this question: what does that do to the validity of prospect rankings?

Granted, there have been a lot of misses, and I mean a lot. But it also appears that the Bruins drafting philosophy has changed over the last couple of years. Only time will tell if they are successful, but I do like the direction and approach they’ve taken.

In Part 3, I gave you what I believe each player’s chances are at making the NHL for players in Providence and it may not look very good at first glance. Even if you exclude Lohrei, I believe Merkulov, Kuntar, Lysell and Farinacci are sure fire NHL’ers. So is Bussi but whether it’s with Boston or another NHL club is dependent on how the Bruins deal with their goaltending situation moving forward. Considering 1 in 3 AHL players go on to play in the NHL regularly, that’s a decent return for Boston.    

And there is still hope for Marc McLaughlin and the trio of Brett Harrison, Frederic Brunet and Ryan Mast who are just beginning their pro development.

Of the non-pros, I really like Riley Duran, Dans Locmelis, Oskar Jellvik and Jonathan Myrenberg. They look like future NHL’ers at this point. Further down are Beckett Hendrickson, Chris Pelosi and Ryan Walsh who still have a lot of development time ahead of them but look promising.

So, is it as dire as the prospect rankings suggest? Not really. As I said earlier, they have Pastrnak and McAvoy locked up long term and hopefully Swayman sometime soon. The emergence of Lohrei and Poitras looks promising. They lack that one high end talent in the pool and Lysell was supposed to be that. And maybe he can still get there. And that effects the rankings.

But there’s a lot of promise for future middle six and bottom 4 defencemen in the system. 

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