Bruins Re-Sign Marchand

On Wednesday afternoon, the Boston Bruins announced that they finally put pen to paper with key restricted free agent Brad Marchand, giving him a new 2-year, $5 million deal to extend his stay with the defending champions.

In the regular season, Marchand was an effective depth scorer, picking up 21 goals and 20 assists in 77 games for the Bruins, which had him ranked 136th among all forwards.  Finishing in the top 160 in forwards scoring meant he ended up being a good depth pick-up last season, something he'll look to improve upon, possibly with some better ice-time in 2012.

As of right now, with the changes that have been made in Boston and the likely improvements to Tyler Seguin's numbers, I think Marchand is on track for a mild improvement, but I don't think he necessarily has the overall skill set to really take the league by storm in the regular season.  I'll be looking at him to boost into the 45-point mark or so.

Forwards		Defense		Goalies
Patrice Bergeron	75	Zdeno Chara	40	Tim Thomas	80
David Krejci	70	Joe Corvo	35	Tuukka Rask	20
Milan Lucic	65	Dennis Seidenberg	30
Nathan Horton	55	Johnny Boychuk	20
Tyler Seguin	50	Andrew Ference	15
Brad Marchand	45	Adam McQuaid	10
Rich Peverley	40
Benoit Pouliot	35
Gregory Campbell	30
Chris Kelly	25
Shawn Thornton	20
Dan Paille	10
Marc Savard	0
Jordan Caron	20	Steven Kampfer	15

This now brings the Boston Bruins up to 20 players on their projected roster, with Marc Savard eliminated from these calculations, thanks to his season-long recovery that is planned for his post-concussion symptoms. The Bruins also have a buyout and a cap overage penalty on their calculations, which brings their projected annual cap hit up to $55.2 million, which gives them plenty of space to work with for the last two or three players they could add to the roster after camp.