How hot are Don Sweeney and Cam Neely’s seats?

75756A5E-120A-4932-810C-2FD980DB785E

In a recent poll of Bruins fans conducted by The Athletic, 91.4% of nearly 2,500 respondents said general manager Don Sweeney and team president Cam Neely are not “the right executives to lead the Bruins.”

That might lead one to believe that both are on the hot seat. Yet, it doesn’t really feel like they are, does it?

Bruce Cassidy is shipping off to Vegas

Sweeney is expected to sign an extension soon. Neely publicly committed to that weeks ago. Sweeney has since been allowed to fire Bruce Cassidy and launch a coaching search, so there’s no reason to believe anything has changed despite the delay in putting ink to paper.

If anything, it seems like Sweeney’s seat was hotter this past season, when Neely let him operate on the final year of his contract without an extension in place. Neely told reporters after the season that he did not approach ownership about extending Sweeney until after the trade deadline.

As for Neely, there has been no indication anywhere that his job is in jeopardy. By all accounts, he continues to have a good relationship with the Jacobs family. The Jacobs approved of his plan to extend Sweeney.

Presumably, Sweeney’s extension will be for more than just one year. Going year-to-year at the general manager position is not something any organization wants to get in the habit of doing. That would only encourage the GM to sacrifice the team’s long-term outlook for short-term success. And given that the Bruins are rapidly approaching a transition period -- one that could begin this summer if Patrice Bergeron decides to retire -- their GM needs to have an eye on the future.

It certainly seems like Sweeney and Neely will get the chance to oversee this transition, or at least the start of it. The questions, then, are what do they need to do, and when do they need to do it by, for their jobs to remain safe? How will this transition be judged?

Obviously, the ultimate end goal will be to build the Bruins’ next Stanley Cup team. But does the path to getting there require a full rebuild, the kind of bottoming out that lands you top-five picks? Is it closer to a one- or two-year retool, like the Bruins went through in the mid-2010s? Or will they be expected to continue to make the playoffs every year?

This is where it would be great to hear from the Jacobs to find out what their expectations are. Neither Jeremy nor Charlie Jacobs has spoken to the media this season or offseason, though. All we have to go off is what’s been relayed by Neely and Sweeney.

Neely acknowledged after the season that he’s thought about the possibility of a rebuild, but ultimately sounded like someone who isn’t preparing for a full teardown.

“I don’t think anyone really wants to watch losing hockey. That’s not the plan, is to start losing,” Neely said. “You look at teams across the league that have lost a lot of hockey games over the number of years, and they are in rebuilds. They get better draft picks and ultimately better players, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job the last 10, 11 years of trying to stay in that window to win. But eventually it does catch up to you. But like I said, we do have some good young players in this lineup that hopefully we can build around in the next couple years, so we don’t have to do a complete rebuild.”

Sweeney also sounded like someone who isn’t planning for a lengthy rebuild, while also acknowledging the possibility of a 2015-esque retool.

“We’ve been a team that’s been very competitive, and I want to continue to do that,” Sweeney said. “It may take a time period where, not unlike [2015], where we felt that we needed to make some changes in where we had several players on long-term deals, and I made some very tough decisions at that point in time trying to infuse some younger players. At times we did it well and other times we fell short. Fully acknowledge that along the path here as well. We need to continue to do a better job in all those areas if we hope to remain competitive.”

So, if Bergeron does retire, how long does Sweeney get for this retool? In addition to getting this coaching hire right, we know what the biggest part of the retool will be: Finding top-six centers. Right now, the Bruins do not have another No. 1 center ready to step in for Bergeron. They arguably don’t have a No. 2 center, either. The goaltending and defense are in good shape for the present and the future. Extending David Pastrnak would go a long way toward solidifying the wing situation. When it comes to the big picture and the core of the future, it’s almost all about centers at this point.

Georgii Merkulov, a sneaky good signing by Sweeney this spring, has top-six potential. We’ll have a better idea after a full season in Providence if he’s on his way to reaching that potential. Jack Studnicka hasn’t gotten there yet, and his development has plateaued the last couple years. Johnny Beecher and Marc McLaughlin project more as bottom-six forwards. 2021 third-round pick Brett Harrison might have a chance to climb higher in the lineup if he continues to build on a strong 2021-22 OHL season. Top prospect Fabian Lysell has played a little bit of center, but is really a right wing and would ideally stay on the wing.

Finding top-six centers via free agency or trade is difficult and expensive. Nazem Kadri is the only unrestricted free agent this offseason who is A) even a borderline No. 1 center, and B) in or close to his prime. Whoever signs him is going to have to pay him a lot of money past his prime and into his late 30s, though. Mark Scheifele might be on the trade block; it will cost an arm and a leg to get him.

Sweeney cautioned that it “might take years” to replace Bergeron. Will he get years to try to do it? Hasn’t he already had years to prepare for this? While fully acknowledging that it’s not easy to find and develop No. 1 centers when you’re not picking high in the first round, it’s not like Bergeron and David Krejci getting older is a problem that snuck up on the Bruins.

Neely’s admission that he wanted to see how this past season went before extending Sweeney suggests that Sweeney did something that helped win him over. Presumably it wasn’t his free-agent signings last summer (which didn’t move the needle overall) or the fact that the team he built lost in the first round.

A few things do stand out as positives, though. Sweeney traded for and then extended Hampus Lindholm, the kind of all-around left-shot defenseman Neely had been publicly pining for in recent years. Also, Lysell and 2020 second-round pick Mason Lohrei had excellent developmental seasons, cementing their place as legitimate blue-chip prospects and suggesting that perhaps Sweeney’s drafting has taken a turn for the better.

You can envision a conversation where Neely tells Sweeney, “OK, you’ve found those guys. Now go find a No. 1 center.”

If he doesn’t, then the Bruins won’t be contending for the Cup any time soon. And if Sweeney can’t build the Bruins’ next Cup contender, then by his own admission, he may be out of a job.

“If I don’t [make the necessary changes], guess what? Somebody else will be standing up here,” Sweeney said last week. “I referenced that with the Jacobs family and with Cam, that one of the best parts about working for this organization is to be held to that standard, knowing that you have the full latitude to make the recommendations and the decisions that you think are right. And then when they’re not, they get somebody else.”

Obviously, if Sweeney gets this coaching hire right, finds a No. 1 center, some of his prospects step up, and the Bruins are on the upswing by this time next year, his job will remain pretty safe.

The question is, what if that doesn’t happen? What if the Bruins are just kind of stuck in place, still looking for their center, still waiting on prospects, still not moving towards Cup contention?

If there isn’t tangible progress over the next year, would the heat from ownership begin to match the heat from fans? Or perhaps the old adage about the Jacobs is true, and they really won’t care or notice until their bottom line is affected -- by missed playoff revenue and/or a drop in ticket and merchandise sales. That certainly hasn’t happened yet; Forbes valued the Bruins at $1.3 billion in 2021, up 30% from 2020 and 63% from five years ago, and they sold out every game this past season.

Featured Image Photo Credit: Getty Images