The sides came together the same day Spooner, a restricted free agent, was scheduled to have an arbitration hearing in Toronto.
"I don't think a player wants to sit through that. It's not a pleasant thing to sit through," Spooner said of a possible arbitration hearing. "I don't think the team wants to carry that out either because it's kind of not a pleasant thing to go through. So we just kind of found the common ground."
Spooner, 25, had 39 points (11 goals, 28 assists) in 78 games with the Bruins last season. He had two assists in four Stanley Cup Playoff games.
"For me I'm going to spin [the one-year contract] into a positive and say that I'm going to take that as a challenge to have a good year and show that I can be the player that they want me to be," Spooner said. "And then on the [other] side too, it kind of just shows that they need to see a little bit more out of me as a player. We've talked and they've said there's many things I do great, there's a lot of things I do to help out the team. There's a lot of things that I can also bring to the table that I need to work on. So it's kind of where I'm at right now."
Spooner scored 18 of his points last season on the power play (three goals, 15 assists).
"We know Ryan has the offensive skills to be an impactful player, especially while on the power play," general manager Don Sweeney said. "We expect Ryan to continue to take the necessary steps with his development to be an even more complete, two-way player."
Selected by Boston in the second round (No. 45) of the 2010 NHL Draft, Spooner has 117 points (32 goals, 85 assists) in 214 regular-season NHL games.
"I think the next step that I need to make is when the offense kind of dries up I need to be able to be more of a dependable, defensive guy," Spooner said. "That's kind of what I need to work on. And if that's strength or kind of the mental side of the game, that's kind of for me to figure out, that's what I've been trying to do and trying to get to the gym and just kind of work on my game. I'm excited for this season. So I just want to go out there and show that I can help out. ...
"I think that's the main thing that I took away from this season is I kind of looked back on it and I said, 'If I was playing against myself, would I find that hard or would I find that easy?' I think the answer to that is, at times that I'm on my game and I'm skating well, I'm making plays, then it would be hard. But at times that I'm not doing that, I think it would be easy. So I just need to work on that part of my game and everything should be fine."
NHL.com correspondent Matt Kalman contributed to this report
