Morning Skate: Beginning

It is Wednesday, my dudes.

And for all intents and purposes, today marks the beginning of hockey season, as the Bruins open training camp with off-ice activities today.

On-ice festivities will begin tomorrow, with the preseason starting on Sunday.

It was a weird off-season in many ways: the abrupt end to the season led a lot of fans to kind of tune out.

Those who didn’t tune out were often really, really mad (not so much around here, you folks are fairly level-headed). That only increased in intensity when Vegas won the Stanley Cup.

After that, the Bruins’ top two centers retired, the team signed a glut of depth guys when free agency opened, their trade deadline acquisitions went elsewhere, there was an airport fashion show...yeah.

In some ways, it’ll kind of be nice to get back to business as usual.

Obviously the first few days of camp (and even the first couple of preseason games) rarely produce anything of substance, but it wouldn't be shocking to see the B’s name a captain sometime soon.

There’s also a nice new look at TD Garden:

In a bit of housekeeping news, we still have a handful of player/management ratings to get through. It’s been one of those summers where time and inspiration were hard to come by.

I’ll likely end up combining the few that remain into shorter posts so we can discuss the ratings, but don’t feel like in-depth pieces are necessary once training camp starts.

After all, who wants to spend camp talking about the past, right? Right.

Thanks for bearing with us through the off-season. Onward to bigger and better things.

What’s on tap for today?