Whether or not Don Sweeney lands any help for his team by now and Friday’s trade deadline, it is a good bet that the Bruins general manager will be shaking the tree to see what falls out until the 3 p.m. ET cut-off.
With all the names to which the B’s have been linked over the past couple of weeks, from Robert Thomas to Rasmus Ristolainen to Oliver Ekman-Larson (yet again), you have to assume that Sweeney is at least doing his due diligence. The work may not yield anything – in fact, he did lay the groundwork for standing pat by saying Monday that wasn’t going to be as aggressive in past years – but his past says he’ll give it a shot.
Most years he’s been a buyer, and he’s bought big, landing such players like Rick Nash, Taylor Hall, Tyler Bertuzzi and Dmitry Orlov. None took the B’s to a Stanley Cup, but it wasn’t for the GM’s lack of trying. Last season, he had to perform a major gear shift, not just selling but off-loading his captain and several other regulars.
At the moment, it looks like his best deal was with Toronto for Brandon Carlo (ask any Maple Leafs fan). The B’s landed young center Fraser Minten, who looks like a mainstay in the B’s middle for the next generation, a top-5 protected first-round pick in 2026 and a fourth-round pick in 2025 (defenseman Vashek Blanar).
But a sneaky good deal was one that was met with little more than a shrug at the time it happened. The B’s sent Justin Brazeau to the Minnesota Wild for former Bruin Jakub Lauko, a 2026 sixth-round pick and a little-known forward by the name of Marat Khusnutdinov.
Khusnutdinov did not come without pedigree. Minnesota used the 37th overall pick to take him in the 2020 draft. But he was not able to distinguish himself in his short time with the Wild, compiling just 3-8–11 in 73 games.
He showed more than that down the stretch with the B’s, scoring three goals with two assists in 18 games. Still, it was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser when the B’s signed him to a two-year extension worth $925,000.
Now that looks like money and roster spot well spent. After starting slowly and enduring some healthy scratches at the start of the season, he has become a fixture in the B’s lineup, wherever coach Marco Sturm chooses to play him. Right now, he’s getting ice time with David Pastrnak and Elias Lindholm. At 23, the 5-11, 184-pound spark plug could only be scratching the surface of what he can be. In the B’s 2-1 win over the Penguins on Tuesday, in which he scored his 13th goal, his presence was felt all over the ice.
For first-year coach Sturm, Khusnutdinov was a blank slate.
“He’s just getting better and better,” said Sturm, whose team faced the Predators in Nashville on Thursday. “When I signed here, I didn’t know him at all. I’d heard his name before but I didn’t know him as a player. I saw him in a few clips in games after I signed. Before training camp, we didn’t know where he was going to be. Is he going to be an up-and-down guy, minor league, NHL? I didn’t know.
“I kind of saw something right from the start and I told Don, ‘There’s something I like.’ He didn’t have a good preseason, though. He really didn’t. But he was getting better and better and he just has that motor. He hunts a lot of pucks, he’s very smart. He covers and he does a lot of work, especially right now with Lindy and Pasta. I feel like those guys need a guy like that. He’s on his way to being more and more consistent. But you see a game like (Tuesday), and he was pretty damn good. I like his development, I like where he’s heading, too. He’s not done yet.”
What Khusnitdinov’s ceiling is remains to be seen. He has the work ethic and doggedness on the puck like an effective bottom-six player. In the offensive zone, he will sometimes still take too long with the puck when he’s trying to create and the chance goes by the wayside. But he’s getting better at that and, with his speed and stick skills, he could become a fixture in the top-six. Right now, Sturm is toggling him with Morgan Geekie on that top line, sometimes when they have an offensive-zone faceoff, sometimes by feel. Sturm believes he can become more of an offensive producer.
“I think so. I really do. But I like his two-way game and his mindset ,his details of the game. I think he’s one of our better killers. So I like that,” Sturm said. “And I can put him anywhere, center, right, left, you name it, because he’s that smart. There’s something to it. He still needs to grow. There are things he needs to get better at, he still needs to be more consistent. But I like where he’s heading.”
The Moscow native’s English is still not the strongest, at least when it comes to dealing with monolingual reporters. But Sturm said he’s able to communicate with him through the universal language of hockey and the message gets across clearly.
“He gets it,” Sturm said.
In the room with his teammates, he’s a lot less inhibited.
“He’s probably the opposite of what you guys see, which is great,” said Geekie with a laugh. “He’s super outgoing and has a lot of fun. He’s a great person and he cares about everyone. He’s definitely a team-first guy, even when he was getting scratched at the start of the year. He was right there alongside us the whole time. It means a lot to us to see him have success.”
That he’s gifted was no secret to Khusnutdinov’s teammates. It was a matter of putting it together.
“We all knew he can fly. He’s got tons of skill,” Geekie said. “We forget that he’s a young kid and with the language barrier. He’s matured a lot in his game and I think you’ve seen that come out when he puts himself in good spots to create those opportunities, both offensively and defensively. I think he’s been given the opportunity to play with top-six, top-nine guys for lots of the season and he’s produced. It’s a league of opportunity at the end of the day and I think he’s done a good job of seizing that. But it’s to nobody’s surprise in this room.”
