Bruins GM second-guesses decision about 2024 draft pick

BOSTON — With the benefit of hindsignt, Bruins general manager Don Sweeney said Dean Letourneau might have benefitted from a year of junior hockey.

As a freshman at BC on a team loaded with NHL picks, Letourneau, the Bruins No. 1 pick last year, struggled with the jump in level. He played a lot of third line and finished with no goals and three assists.

“Significant growing pains, making a very big jump from the level of hockey he was the year before, to the demands of college,” Sweeney said. “And in hindsight, I think we all would have agreed that maybe another year of the USHL, a full year of the USHL would have been the best path.”

Letourneau, is a 6-foot-7 center, who took a non-traditional path to the draft. Unlike most of his Canadian peers, he didn’t play junior hockey. Instead he played at St. Andrews a Canadian high school where he put up monster numbers — 61 goals, 66 assists in 57 games.

He was originally slated to play for Dubuque in the USHL in 2024-25 and then play college hockey at Boston College in 2025-26. But when BC’s Will Smith turned pro a year earlier than many expected, Letourneau had a chance to not only go to college last year, but do so just up the road from the Bruins, who could monitor his progress.

“Physically he was able to play at the at the college level, and that opportunity presented in a bit of a unique fashion,” Sweeney said. “I think everybody was sort of with the understanding that physically, he was ready to do it. Now, whether or not you can carry that over in the highest level, because that’s what the expectations at BC are, and be successful from a point production standpoint, that’s a leap.”

But the sizable jump from a high school in a country where almost all of the best players choose junior hockey to one of the best college programs in Division I proved to be difficult.

Sweeney hoped the struggle would have value.

“Deep down, is he better off for it? We’ll see this year, because I think that that he’s been tested mentally and physically,” he said. “He’s putting in work now that he has an understanding of how much work it requires to play at that level and be successful. That’s not necessarily a negative. It’s just that when players have had the success and put up the points their entire careers, and all of a sudden they’re like, hold on, this is a lot harder. It’s deflating to a degree.

“But talking through with it, he’ll be fine,” Sweeney continued. “He’ll earn his opportunity back, work his way up the depth chart and start to produce like he has. So, I don’t look at as a setback, I just look at it like a reality slap in a lot of ways.”