Marchand trade to Panthers signals end of era for Bruins

BOSTON -- They’re all gone, now.

As the years passed, the veterans of the 2011 Stanley Cup team had moved on, to other teams via trades, to retirement, to the Hall of Fame. They had left the NHL, one by one, to join front offices and coaching staffs and TV broadcasts.

But through it all, Brad Marchand survived in Boston. He watched his linemates and teammates filter out, the last remaining piece of a decade of success with the Boston Bruins. He matured, became a 100-point scorer and part of the best line in hockey with Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak. He earned the captaincy.

On Friday, though, it ended. Marchand, who had played all of his 16 seasons with the Bruins and who had hoped to remain in his adopted city the rest of his career, was traded to the Florida Panthers on a day in which the team shipped out as much as they could, dipping their toes into a rebuild without fully jumping in.

“Clearly we looked at the opportunities in front of us to change the direction of things, without just tearing things down,” general manager Don Sweeney said. “That’s not been part of the DNA of this organization and won’t be.”

Marchand was traded for a 2027 conditional second-round draft pick that would become either a 2027 or 2028 first-round pick if Florida wins two rounds in the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs and Marchand appears in at least 50 percent of the team’s playoff games, with the Bruins retaining 50 percent of his salary.

The Bruins also traded center Charlie Coyle to the Colorado Avalanche and defenseman Brandon Carlo to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Friday, after trading Trent Frederic to the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday and Justin Brazeau to the Minnesota Wild on Thursday, selling off just about all of their available and prized assets in a bid to return to relevancy just two seasons after setting the NHL record for wins (65) and points (135) in 2022-23.

Now, only six players -- Pastrnak, Jeremy Swayman, Charlie McAvoy, Hampus Lindholm, Pavel Zacha, and the recently reacquired Jakub Lauko -- remain from that team.

It has been a precipitous drop.

To make runs in those years, especially in 2019 when the Bruins reached Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final before falling to the St. Louis Blues, and in that 2023 season, the Bruins had shipped out significant amounts of draft picks, leaving the cupboards bare.

Now, they are left trying to make up for it.

“It starts to take its toll,” Sweeney said. “And you have to have a little bit of step-back approach at times. Did we come in this morning knowing we were making every one of these moves? No. But we were prepared if the things that we would like presented.

“Regardless, that’s a difficult thing. But the message is clearly not about, we didn’t burn it down.”

Marchand, who is out 3-4 weeks with an upper-body injury, according to Sweeney, is an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season. While the two sides had been in contract talks since last July, the Bruins determined that they were too far apart to come to an agreement. Marchand, who turns 37 on May 11, has said he would like to play until he is at least 40.

“Just had a gap,” Sweeney said. “Deep down. We had been talking really from day two of free agency in terms of what his intentions were and where we were at. We always had a bit of a term gap that took us a while. Felt that we had been able to bridge that. But, again, a player is more than entitled to have an understanding of what they think their market value is and do what’s best for them. And I have to always respect that.”

That led to what Sweeney called “a really, really difficult decision to say, let’s give Brad another opportunity with a really good team and then he can make his decision what he thinks is best moving forward.”

He added that the door is not closed to a reunion this summer.

The forward finished his career in Boston with 976 points (422 goals, 554 assists) in 1,090 games after being taken in the third round (No. 71) of the 2006 NHL Draft. He was fourth all-time in games played for the Original Six franchise, fourth in goals, sixth in assists, fifth in points, second in game-winning goals (82) and first in short-handed goals (36).

“That one goes back a long ways for me and cuts deeper than really any player that I’ve had the privilege of getting to know and watch thrive and become a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest Bruins ever,” Sweeney said. “So, a difficult day from that standpoint, personally, professionally, making some very difficult decisions.”

But it wasn’t only Marchand.

The Bruins traded Coyle to the Avalanche along with a 2026 fifth-round pick for forwards Casey Mittelstadt and William Zellers and a 2025 second-round draft pick, whichever of the ones Colorado currently owns that results in a lower placement in the draft order.

Carlo was sent to the Maple Leafs for forward prospect Fraser Minten, a 2026 first-round draft pick (top-five protected) and a 2025 fourth-round draft pick (from the Philadelphia Flyers), with the Bruins retaining 15 percent of Carlo’s salary.

They also acquired defenseman Henri Jokiharju from the Buffalo Sabres for the fourth-round pick in 2026 that they had received in the Frederic deal with the Oilers.

In the draft picks they obtained, in the prospects they acquired, the hope is that Boston can find a next wave of talent, a wave that can send them back into the mix for the playoff spot that they are unlikely to earn this season, with the Bruins three points out of the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference entering Friday with three teams between them and the Ottawa Senators in that spot.

Not that it was a no-brainer to go the way they did on Friday. There were, to Sweeney’s mind, some questions, some doubt as to whether the cuts had to be as deep as they were.

“Those are the internal struggles you have as a manager to chart the proper course,” Sweeney said. “If we just run it back, are we risking repeating some of the same mistakes, have we improved enough, can we continue to improve? And that’s the tipping point, making a decision that says, we’ve had a good run. We did not complete the ultimate goal.

“We were close, as close as you’re probably going to get other than going to overtime in that game [Game 7]. And those are tremendous players, they’ve been tremendous Bruins. Now it’s, well, we’ve got another wave that we have to find and see if we can build back to that area. And I don’t think we’re going to be far away from being the competitive team that we should and could have been this year.”

This will be a new version of the Bruins when they reconvene on Saturday, set to face the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena (3 p.m. ET; ABC, ESPN+, SN1, TVAS). The Bruins will be a lesser team, a team expecting to play out the string, against a team that reloaded for the playoffs, readying itself for a long run.

For so long, that was who the Bruins were. Not anymore.

Their time is up.

“They’re going to teams that we’re jealous of,” Sweeney said. “We’ve been in the same situation with those teams, they’re loading up. Had we done our job, if I had done my job appropriately, starting there, we would be adding like we have in previous years.”

Instead, Sweeney was left to call his two alternate captains, in Pastrnak and McAvoy, on Friday, telling them the news that their teammates and friends would be leaving, that the team wasn’t good enough, that there were hard times ahead.

Sweeney wouldn’t divulge the contents of those conversations, preferring them to remain private, but it would be easy to believe that McAvoy, who spent last offseason with the deepening conviction that it was time for this generation of Bruins players to win the Cup, who posted broken hearts to his Instagram in the wake of the trade news Friday, would not be thrilled with the new direction.

“We know we’re sort of taking a step back in the course of the season because we haven’t been to the level we need to be,” Sweeney said. “But the mandate is, hey, let’s get this right and make the right decisions moving forward. And today was part of that. … We’re trying to put things in a position where we’re right back in that competitive mode that very next year and doing things right.”