Former Boston Bruin and current Calgary Flame Dougie Hamilton couldn't do much right on Tuesday night as his old team squared off with his new team at TD Garden. The game wound up a 2-1 victory for the home squad, but even in victory, the Bruins probably didn't feel all that great about the outcome as they headed off the ice.
It wasn't a good game by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, it was a much-needed two points for a Boston squad trying to remain in the thick of the Eastern Conference playoff race, but it was, by nearly all accounts, a lackluster affair. Really, the highlight of the game probably was listening to the Bruins fans lustily booing Hamilton every time he touched the puck, en route to a minus-1 rating on the night.
Hamilton, of course, is the former Bruins first-round pick who forced his way out of Boston this past offseason. Any number of reasons have been floated as to why Hamilton wanted out or why the team pushed him out, from the franchise's refusal to acquire his brother - the Flames acquired Freddie Hamilton in October, only a few short months after adding Dougie - to the elder Hamilton's personality and questionable motivation.
Either way, Hamilton apparently made it clear after all the goings on that even truckloads of cash wouldn't be enough to keep him in Bean town.
In the end, Hamilton is a Flame and the Bruins utilized the three picks, one first and two seconds, acquired from Calgary in the deal to add to their stockpile of young talent. What's most interesting now though, especially in light of the poor performance of both teams on Tuesday night, is to look back and attempt to parse whether either team really wound up on the winning or losing end of the trade.
Hamilton, for all the hype that surrounded his arrival in Calgary, has been entirely mediocre to start his Flames career. Through 63 games in 2015-16, Hamilton has just 9 goals, 27 points and a minus-11 rating. He started off slow, notching just 2 goals and 5 points in his first 20 games, but seemed to be picking things up around December.
Unfortunately, the offensive-defenseman ghosted again and has too often been a non-factor for a Flames team that's now lost six in a row and fallen well short of expectations this season.
As for the Bruins, it's impossible at this point to say whether the Hamilton trade was a net positive or not. The players picked - Zach Senyshyn in the first, Jakob Forsbacka-Karlsson and Jeremy Lauzon in the second - are all still years away from making the leap to the NHL.
But if we're going on this season alone, there's no doubting that the surprisingly effective Bruins squad would look a whole lot better with Hamilton patrolling the backend on the power play and the top-pairing alongside captain Zdeno Chara. That though, isn't first-year Bruins GM Don Sweeney's main concern.
Sure, keeping the team competitive while he transitions to a younger roster is important - but so is the transition. And while Hamilton would have made the Bruins a stronger team this year, who knows what his personality foibles would have done to the franchise in the future.
It wasn't especially pretty on Tuesday, but the game didn't show two teams struggling with the after-effects of a bad trade - it was two teams going through the growing pains that come with new faces in new places, with trying to build a winner.
