The Boston Bruins Are Tracking For A Historic Season Despite Salary-Cap Constraints

One of the key selling points for the National Hockey League is its level playing field.

With the help of the league’s hard salary cap, there’s a good chance that any team can beat any other team on any given night. It makes for exciting games and suspenseful outcomes — and offers tantalizing long-odds opportunities for sports bettors.

This season, the league-leading Boston Bruins have, for the most part, separated themselves from that narrative.

On Saturday, the Bruins lost consecutive games for the first time all season, dropping a 4-3 overtime decision on the road to the Florida Panthers. That puts Boston at 38-6-5 for the year. With 81 points, the Bruins have an enormous 11-point edge over the league’s second-place team, the Carolina Hurricanes.

With an .827 points percentage for the season, Boston is on pace for 135 points this season. The NHL’s all-time highs were set by the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens — a group which amassed a regular-season record of 60-8-12 for 132 points in 80 games and a points percentage of .825 before going on to win its second of four straight Stanley Cups.

If this year’s Bruins surpass the regular-season record of that legendary Canadiens team from nearly half a century ago, there will be one small asterisk. In the 70s, ties were still allowed in the NHL. So far this season, the Bruins have won five games in overtime or shootouts when their games were tied after 60 minutes. If you take away those five points, their points percentage would drop to .776 — below that Montreal team but identical to the best regular-season Bruins squad in history, from 1970-71.

On the other hand, while those legendary groups from days gone by didn’t have the benefit of the three-point overtime system, they did enjoy advantages of their own — especially, wide-open roster options.

With no salary cap, the 1976-77 Canadiens were loaded with top-end talent. Nine players from that roster, along with general manager Sam Pollock and all-time winningest coach Scotty Bowman, were all later named to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

This year’s Bruins certainly aren’t short on talent. But the challenges that Bruins general manager Don Sweeney faced when assembling his group under this season’s $82.5 million cap ceiling are monumental compared to Pollock’s assignment in the 70s, when the Canadiens attracted top talent with ease as one of the NHL’s wealthiest and most historically successful franchises.

This year’s master plan in Boston began with bringing Stanley Cup-winning veterans Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci back into the fold on contracts that are well below market value for what they bring to the table. New coaching hire Jim Montgomery has also been a standout. And across the top of their roster, the Bruins are getting elite value out of three of their best players.

Forward: David Pastrnak

Per CapFriendly, the 26-year-old right winger is in the last year of a six-year contract that carries a cap hit of $6.667 million. That ranks 59th among NHL forwards this season.

A consistently reliable scorer, Pastrnak is once again nestled among the league’s top names. His 38 goals rank second overall behind Connor McDavid (40). He’s fourth in points, with 71. And he’s leading the NHL in shots on goal this season (239) while converting on 16% of those shots.

Now in his ninth season after joining the Bruins as an 18-year-old out of the Czech Republic, Pastrnak ranks fifth overall in goals (277) and 17th in points (557) since the 2014-15 season. With unrestricted free agency looming this summer, he’s due for a significant raise. It’s expected that the Bruins will find a way to keep him in the fold.

Defense: Charlie McAvoy

The fourth-place finisher in Norris Trophy voting as the NHL’s top defenseman last season, McAvoy’s counting stats won’t blow away other blueliners. But the 25-year-old is a valuable right-shot rearguard who plays in all situations and operates at a very high level on both sides of the puck.

Selected 14th overall out of Boston University in 2016, McAvoy carries Boston’s highest cap hit, at $9.5 million per season. That ties him for fourth-highest among defensemen with Adam Fox of the New York Rangers and Seth Jones of the Chicago Blackhawks. But he’s also in just the second season of his eight-year pact: locked up until 2029-30 with his best years ahead of him and the salary cap likely to soon start rising dramatically after a few stagnant seasons.

Goal: Linus Ullmark

Originally drafted in the sixth round by the Buffalo Sabres in 2012, Linus Ullmark’s body of work wasn’t especially noteworthy when he signed on with Boston for four years at a cap hit of $5 million per season on July 28, 2021, three days shy of his 27th birthday.

Sweeney saw upside as he sought a successor to longtime starter Tuukka Rask, the two-time all-star and 2014 Vezina Trophy winner. And after a decent debut season in Boston, Ullmark has now taken his game to the next level.

He’s the current front-runner for the Vezina Trophy, leading all goalies with at least three games played this season in save percentage (.938), goals-against average (1.86), goals saved above expected (27.5) and, most crucially, wins (25).

Oh, and that cap hit? Ullmark’s $5 million ties him with six other stoppers for 14th-most this season. Illustrating once again how volatile the goaltending position can be, Ullmark is in very diverse company. Juuse Saros is having another strong season in Nashville and Semyon Varlamov has been steady with the New York Islanders, while Jack Campbell is starting to find his footing in his first season with the Edmonton Oilers. Elsewhere, Robin Lehner and Thatcher Demko are both sidelined with injuries, while Cal Petersen was demoted from the Los Angeles Kings to the AHL’s Ontario Reign after a rough start to his year.

A trio of netminders have cap hits that are head-and-shoulders above the others this season: injured Carey Price ($10.5 million), Sergei Bobrovsky of the Florida Panthers, who’s also currently injured ($10 million) and two-time Stanley Cup champion Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Tampa Bay Lightning ($9.5 million).