BOSTON — The Bruins who take the ice for the first practice of training camp on Thursday morning will look awfully different than their counterparts of a year ago.
After missing the playoffs and selling at the trade deadline, the Bruins will begin the next step in their rebuild with a new coach and a lot of new players. Marco Sturm will lead practice with 16 skaters and three goalies who didn’t play for the Bruins a year ago as he begins the task of narrowing his roster down to the 18 players, who’ll take the ice on Oct. 8 in Washington.
There are potentially a lot of jobs up for grabs. Both Sturm and general manager Don Sweeney want the younger players to come into camp believing they can earn a spot.
“There will be opportunities. That’s what I’m excited about,” Sturm said. “I worked with all of the young kids the last three years (as an AHL coach), so I want them to have success and I’m going to do everything I can to put them in a good spot. I want them to push some other guys and maybe some of the older veterans too.
“Usually there’s always one surprise in training camp,” he continued. “The last seven years I’ve been coaching at the NHL level, there’s always one surprise and hopefully we have at least one or two coming up in the next couple of weeks.”
Sweeney pointed to Matt Poitras’ standout camp in 2023 as an example of how a player can accelerate their path to the NHL.
“The young players dictate when they’re sort of ready for more and more and more. As you go through, it gets harder,” Sweeney said. “If a player earns the situation, then you have to reward the player. Poitras was the exact same thing. We could have sent him back that year, but he was playing well enough.
“Every player is different, every situation is unique, but the younger players walking into camp, they just have to realize if they’re good enough, we can’t keep them out the NHL,” Sweeney continued. ” Then it’s your opportunity up here, so take advantage of it. You have to walk through and take somebody’s job. That’s just the way our business works. … If a player earns the opportunity to be a Boston Bruins, then we reward them with that.”