Rumors IX: Bruins – Hamilton … Are the Bruins Retooling or Rebuilding?
  • Darren Dreger: The Bruins made contract offers to Dougie Hamilton for four-, five- and six-years. Their best offer was six-years at $5.5 million per season.
  • Joe Haggerty of CSNNE: Being disliked in the Bruins dressing room wasn’t the reason the Bruins traded Dougie Hamilton.

    “By no means was Dougie Hamilton the most popular guy in the Bruins’ dressing room,” Haggerty told Kevin Walsh on Sunday night’s SportsNet Central. “He wasn’t a Shawn Thornton, Johnny Boychuk, happy-go-lucky type. That’s not the type of personality he was.

    “But that’s not the reason he got traded away from the Boston Bruins. To think that is foolish. It’s all about the money; it’s all about the contract.”

  • CSNNE: Are the Bruins “retooling” or “rebuilding”? Kevin Paul Dupont:

    “If you stay on Twitter all day or listen to the fans all day, this is death and destruction,” said Dupont. “They still have a handful of very good guys who frankly, some of them are overpaid. I still like Rask, I still like Chara, I still like Bergeron. There’s a lot of teams out there that don’t have that.

    “I don’t call it a rebuild because they’re still going to end up with five core guys who are here. So it’s retooling around those guys.”

    DJ Bean of WEEI.

    “If I’m these guys I’m willing to listen to everyone at this point,” said Bean. “I wouldn’t have said that before this weekend. But given what they’ve done and the destruction that they’ve started, is it only logical to explore the rest of them?”

  • Matt Kalman of NHL.com: GM Don Sweeney said they are not rebuilding.

    “I don’t think it’s a rebuild. We didn’t strip this down,” said Sweeney, who was promoted last month from assistant general manager to replace Peter Chiarelli. “We have a tremendous core group of guys that are going to obviously carry an even heavier load here in the short term while these other kids can come in and start to take footing. … I’ve always referenced that we need patience in terms of development and then we also, we can’t be impatient in terms of the integration.”

    Sweeney on the trade market.

    “I do believe that the trade market is one that teams are pursuing from a hockey-trade perspective,” he said. “I just think every team tries to look at their own players and possibly re-sign their own players. And when you get in situations and player movement becomes a part of that. Obviously the cap is a big function in all of this; at times makes it more restrictive. But I do believe, in talking with a number of general managers, that the trade market is one that people are pursuing, yes.”