from Steve Conroy of the Boston Herald,

As Friday’s trade deadline quickly approaches, the groans from the Eeyore section of Bruin fandom are becoming louder. Everything is awful, the professional pessimists say. The team should just dump all the good players on expiring contracts for draft picks and play for next year, they say, as if anything could came of packing it in.

And, sure, performances like the one the B’s turned in on Saturday night on Long Island in the 5-1 no-show loss do feed that narrative.

But becoming a straight seller when you’ve been at or near the top of the NHL for the entire season? Silly doesn’t begin to describe that thinking.

Yet what GM Don Sweeney can actually accomplish by Friday with the B’s paucity of draft capital (zero picks in the first three rounds of June’s draft) and salary cap space (current cap space of less than $70,000, according to capfriendly.com) is anyone’s guess. He’ll have to be creative, and it will require moving a roster player or two out. He won’t be able to make the kind of impact moves – or what he and everyone else thought were impact moves – like he did last season.

But they need a big thumper in the lineup and, considering the way they’ve been allowing goals lately (11 straight games of three goals or more), they could use some nasty on the blue line the most.

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