Bruins GM Don Sweeney delivers bad news to Bruins fans

Fans of the Boston Bruins may need to start preparing themselves for what is shaping up to be an offseason of big changes to the team that rewrote the NHL record books last season with 65 victories in the regular season but crashed and burned in the playoffs against the Florida Panthers - and this is coming on the heels of their already having traded forwards Taylor Hall and Nick Foligno to the Chicago Blackhawks.

In the first place, it's beginning to look more and more as though veterans Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci will in fact hang up the skates and end their NHL careers.

Additionally, based on comments made by GM Don Sweeney this afternoon, the team is not optimistic about bringing back pending free agents Tyler Bertuzzi, Dmitri Orlov and Garnet Hathaway.

“None of those guys have been necessarily closed off. Obviously, we circled with most of them based on our decision yesterday,” Sweeney said of decisions with the team’s free agents. “But haven’t really concretely put anything together that that would indicate that I’m going to be able to [re-sign them], in particular on Orly. But you just never know what happens between now and then.”

Meanwhile, team president Cam Neely does not regret going all-in last season given the fact that the team would eventually establish themselves as the best team in regular season hockey history.

“It was worth it,” Neely said. “Obviously the regular-season record speaks for itself. I think we all looked at that roster and said, ‘This is as good a chance as any we’ve got to go deep and get to the finals, at a minimum. So it is extremely disappointing because of what we knew this season was going to bring us, regardless if we won or not.”