The Bruins’ pain is their chief divisional rivals’ gain.
The Bruins’ pain is their chief divisional rivals’ gain.
Tyler Bertuzzi, who’d been rightly seeking a long-term, big-bucks deal, settled for a one-year deal with an AAV of $5.5 million with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Ouch.
It is not the deal he wanted, nor one that was available to the B’s when they had exclusive negotiating rights to Bertuzzi, apparently. The player’s agent Todd Reynolds told ESPN they were seeking a long-term deal from the B’s and they couldn’t agree on money. The two sides decided to go their separate ways and, by the time Bertuzzi’s camp decided the best route was a one-year deal, the B’s had allocated just slightly more than what Bertuzzi signed for in Toronto.
The question is if GM Don Sweeney, who said on Saturday both term and money were roadblocks to a deal for the 28-year-old, would have been willing to work to get that $5.5 million into his payroll structure. The B’s needed to sign players. While Sweeney has been clear that jobs can be earned by some of his young Providence players like Fabian Lysell and Georgii Merkulov, he wasn’t comfortable enough to hand them jobs without some competition.
