from Stephen Harris of the Boston Herald,

The day before Round 1 of the NHL draft, Bruins president Cam Neely sounded quite confident the team’s fans were going to like what was about to happen. Neely said Don Sweeney, the new general manager, had big things in the works.

“There’s a lot of things that Don has been working on to not only put us in a position to improve on last year, but also for the future,” Neely said Thursday at Fort Lauderdale Beach.

Well, we’re not sure in what alternate universe subtracting Dougie Hamilton and Milan Lucic is going to improve the B’s for next season.

The Sweeney-Neely regime isn’t off to a great start. The trade of Hamilton to Calgary for a first-round pick and two second-rounders was the shocker — still the talk of the draft yesterday.

Critics in Boston aren’t going to want to hear it, but Sweeney and Co. tried hard to engineer a better outcome — either to keep Hamilton (with an annual offer believed to be in the vicinity of $5 million), or by trading him for more value in draft picks or players. They were close on several deals, but in the end they didn’t happen.

“We didn’t want to lose him,” said one Bruins front office source. “We tried everything we could think of.”

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