The Bruins general manager didn’t make any significant moves at Monday’s trade deadline. He didn’t have to. He had already acquired the pieces he wanted 10 days earlier.
“There wasn’t much activity on our part [Monday],” Chiarelli told reporters in Ottawa, where the Bruins will close out their six-game road trip on Tuesday. “We talked to a couple of teams, and we felt that we did most of our stuff within the last couple of weeks. So [Monday] was a quiet day.”
It was relatively quiet across the league. Sixteen deals did get finished before the 3 p.m. deadline, but only a handful of impact players changed addresses. That’s just fine by the Bruins too. After they set themselves up for a long postseason run by acquiring Tomas Kaberle, Rich Peverley and Chris Kelly earlier in the month, the Bruins were content to watch the rest of the East do little to further change the balance of power at the deadline.
Philadelphia remains the biggest threat in the conference. The team that ended Boston’s season with a dramatic comeback from a 3-0 series deficit looks even better this season. The Flyers kicked off the trade season by adding Kris Versteeg early on, but otherwise chose not to mess with the chemistry they’ve already forged.
Pittsburgh also stayed ahead of the curve with last week’s trade of Alex Goligoski for James Neal and Matt Niskanen. Neal might finally give Sidney Crosby a scoring winger to work with, but that won’t matter this year if Crosby doesn’t come back from the concussion that has him sidelined indefinitely.
Montreal, which made stopgap moves to bring in blueliners Paul Mara and Brent Sopel in early February, did nothing else Monday to address its injuries on defense or lack of size up front. Tampa Bay also made no deals. Washington did improve by adding center Jason Arnott and former Bruin defenseman Dennis Wideman on defense, but will the Capitals ever play up to their potential and be a factor in the postseason?
Boston did the most to improve itself over the course of the trading season, even without any last-minute deals at the deadline other than adding AHL goalie Anton Khudobin for Providence’s playoff push.
The Bruins didn’t guarantee anything with their moves. They still face a long road to get out of the East, and if they accomplish that, an even greater test could await in the finals. The West features arguably the two strongest teams in the league in Vancouver and Detroit, though neither of those clubs added much of significance on Monday either.
Don’t plan the parade just yet, but the Bruins have put themselves into the conversation as a contender with their additions, and Chiarelli was having no regrets about getting in on the action early, then standing pat on Monday.
“We’ve done three deals where we’ve added three good pieces,” Chiarelli said. “There has been some subtraction, but we felt that the net benefit was very positive. There wasn’t anything that, when you look back in hindsight after doing the three deals that I was saying, ‘Wow that would be a good one to do.’ No, there wasn’t anything like that.
“We wanted to do our deals in advance enough that the players could join the team and be part of that Western swing,” Chiarelli added. “And they had to be the right players, and we felt that we accomplished both, timing-wise and player personnel-wise.”
With Kaberle, Peverley and Kelly in the fold, the Bruins have rattled off a season-high five-game win streak. Those five games have all come on the road, as the Bruins have a chance to complete their longest trip of the season without a blemish if they can beat Eastern Conference basement dweller Ottawa on Tuesday.
Beyond the success on the ice, which the newcomers have each played a role in, the timing of the trades just before the club embarked on a long road trip that was also important. The time together on the road has helped the new additions bond with the rest of the squad, and the head start on that chemistry was another advantage to making the moves well ahead of the deadline.
The ability for a GM to actually enjoy a rare chance to rest a bit on a deadline day didn’t hurt either.
“Well, certainly that’s not the driving force behind us doing the deals when we did,” Chiarelli said. “It was one of the factors why we wanted to do it, not to get caught up in [the deadline frenzy].
“You just know the players and you know the prices and you know the fits,” Chiarelli added. “So, I mean we did the due diligence, we felt that the players we got were the ones we were targeting. I mean I was exhausted, we were all exhausted after flying [from Edmonton Sunday night], so it was nice to not really have to pull a rabbit out of a hat today in the shape we’re in.”
The Bruins are in much better shape than they were a few weeks ago, and Chiarelli was happy with the work he’s done to make that so. But the ultimate test for the moves that were — and were not — made this month won’t come until late this spring.
“I’m satisfied, yeah,” Chiarelli said. “Talk to me in a few months and I’ll let you know.”
