Reboot, rebuild, or restructure: Call it what you will, but change was inevitable for the Bruins. So it wasn’t surprising when Boston picked up the pace as the trade window was about to close. However, rumors that the Bruins would trade longtime team captain Brad Marchand (who is currently injured) didn’t go down well with the fans. But alas, rumors turned into reality.

The Boston Bruins traded their team leader with just hours left to the deadline. Fans who had already pushed back on the idea were furious. And who became the subject of their anger? Well, none other than General Manager Don Sweeney. However, the Bruins GM stood by his decision. “We didn’t burn it down. We have a lot of guys,” Sweeney said, directly addressing the criticism as per Evan Marinofsky of New England Hockey Journal.

Although Sweeney’s comment sparked the fandom’s fury in the comments section of Marinofsky’s post, there’s more than meets the eye with this trade. That’s because the fans learned murmurs of the Brad Marchand trade rumors at the last moment. As it turns out, the 36-year-old, and the Bruins had been trying to hash out a deal for at least a while before Friday’s surprise trade.

“Just had a gap. Deep down, we had been talking really from day two of free agency,” Tod Sweeney revealed at Warrior Ice Arena on Friday. While Sweeney and Marchand wanted the extension deal to work out, two things stopped them. The 36-year-old asked for multiple years of security beyond the 2024-25 season, but that was something the Boston GM couldn’t give.

Sweeney couldn’t risk Marchand’s injuries piling up with age. The current situation served as a perfect example, as the now-former Bruin has missed three games due to an upper-body injury, and won’t be fit till the playoffs start. So with time running out, the GM had to make the last-moment decision to trade.

Sweeney couldn’t let Brad Marchand walk for free

Don Sweeney and Bruins president Cam Neely knew they had to get some value since they couldn’t reach an agreement with the forward. Yet, that would be impossible if Marchand became an unrestricted free agent. So the Boston Bruins aimed high. Unfortunately, a conditional second-round pick was all they were able to secure in exchange for Marchand.

They also decided to keep Brad Marchand in the Eastern Conference. NHL Insider Chris Johnston’s update had said otherwise. “The feeling league-wide is that the Bruins are likely going to trade Brad Marchand to the Western Conference,” Johnston wrote on X. Yet, Sweeney explained they didn’t really discuss where the 36-year-old would like to go in detail.

“Ultimately, we made a decision for him to be in the East on a really good team,” the GM said as per The New York Times. The fact that the ‘good team’ where Marchand ended up has been Boston’s regional rival for ages also angered hockey fans in Boston. In the end, the team Captain’s departure marked the end of a massive reshuffling of the 2024-25 Bruins’ NHL roster, at least for now.

With Trent Frederic, Max Jones, Brad Marchand, and others out of the roster, the Bruins have completed the first phase of their rebuild. The next phase will start when they exercise all the picks they’ve acquired for the upcoming NHL drafts. So what do you think of this whole situation? Let’s hear your opinions in the comments.