Morning Skate: Moves

It is Wednesday, my dudes.

The Bruins made three minor moves earlier this week, signing recently acquired Reilly Walsh, Alec Regula, and Michael DiPietro to one-year, two-way deals.

Those three will likely make their biggest impacts at the AHL level, though Walsh is probably the most likely among the three to see NHL ice time at some point in the near future.

With those small moves, the Bruins are running out to business to settle, which is never a bad thing.

Per CapFriendly, the B’s have just north of $5 million in available salary cap space with Trent Frederic, Jeremy Swayman, and Patrice Bergeron still to sign.

(I’m assuming David Krejci won’t be back, for the sake of discussion.)

Bergeron may have to take an even slimmer deal than his last one, with silly performance bonuses (“touch the puck once for $500,000”) coming into play.

The other two are a bit trickier — the B’s may try to kick the can down the road a bit with both and try to sign a bridge deal before arbitration, but I guess we’ll see.

As some of you noted earlier in the week, comparables to Frederic have recently signed deals that might put a bit of a squeeze on the B’s.

One interesting part of this off-season: we’re seeing a lot of the same takes about this team that we saw last off-season.

“The Bruins will be lucky to make the playoffs” or “this team is an also-ran as currently constructed.”

Obviously last year’s run won’t be duplicated, but it’s strange to see just how far the team has (allegedly) fallen after a first-round knockout.

I can understand some of the negativity, but the team is returning the vast majority of its good players and still should have a potent offense, decent defense, and excellent goaltending.

Maybe I’m just optimistic though!

What’s on tap for today?