If anybody is gonna play stay-at-home hockey in Boston, it’s Brandon Carlo. Brandon Carlo did exactly that last season.
Brandon Carlo 2k24 Community Rating: 7.2
Brandon Carlo was a safe defender this year. You could probably bet on that if it were a category of bet.
Which, I can’t imagine you’d win much money. After all, Brandon Carlo’s thing is that he’s safe every year. That’s been the hallmark of his game since he joined the team; not trying to draw too much attention to himself, being just physical enough to get the puck away from a forechecker too physical (especially given how his injury history has gone), just corralling the puck; getting it passed off to a player who can create a zone exit, go up the ice in transition as the last trailer, maybe crank a shot or two and maybe it’ll go in; tapping into that vaunted untapped offensive potential of his. If there was any player who clocks in for 80-something games, helps his goalie out, and collects a half-decent paycheck along the way, then it was almost certainly Brandon Carlo. He wakes up at 8, plays 20 minutes on average, kills a ton of penalties, spends almost the entire game right next to his goaltender, and then goes home to have a salad, baked chicken with salt and pepper on it, and then washes it down with a frothy mug of mineral water. That’s who he is. This season reflected that particular skillset’s strong points and weak points to a tee.
Because Carlo’s game is so safe, it makes him a natural fit for the more offensively-minded defenders that have often taken up residence on the left side of the Bruins D to make plays, which he would often try to facilitate.
However, sometimes this safety to a fault mentality ran into a problem, because his defense partner was struggling on some way he couldn’t react to.
Which one? See…that’s the other fly in the ointment: ALL of them did.
In fact, this is sort of a problem that Carlo ran into throughout the year. While his ability to adequately corral pucks hadn’t necessarily changed, his default strategy for getting the puck out of the zone has always relied on his partner or an oncoming forward, and throughout the year, he had some pretty grim help in that department. It’s pretty telling that a guy who got a much worse grade than him in Hampus Lindholm managed to be his best partner, and by and large they failed to crack the 50% mark in most possession metrics at even strength.
Last time I did one of these, I made the observation that Carlo’s offensive on-ice impact was extremely limited due to his insistence on dumping off any puck he won to his defense partner in order to create zone exits. When the Bruins were riding high in 2022-23, it seemed like he’d bucked that trend and had found an extra dimension to his game…but that was now two years ago, and it became clear this year that Carlo had decided to go back to the old him, and as a result it felt like he would sometimes just go through…well…fogs. Last thing you wanna see from a guy who was expected to anchor a pairing with a rotating cast of struggling players.
Carlo was sometimes a little easier than you might expect to knock off the puck or slower than he should be in making a decision with the puck, which often led to severe overcorrection from the forwards and his partner, which sometimes led to stuff like…well…this:
Granted, this didn’t happen nearly as often nor as dramatically as other players on defense, but when it happened it made for some pretty shambolic performances.
Thankfully, when it came time for the playoffs, Carlo experienced a similar boost that Mason Lohrei did; shoring up his game enough not just to be a proud father, but a proud father with a playoff goal on the same day as his child’s birth. It’s hard not to be a little romantic about it; the team’s defensive rock showing what he was capable of. It was only enough to get them through one round, but he absolutely showed that he still had juice, and of course, the things he was still good at were things the Bruins could count on him for.
So now…we’re in a weird spot.
Everyone generally agrees they didn’t like his partner’s performances last year, whomever it is you choose to believe was the worst offender, and could easily write any of his struggles off as a result of inadequate play by his partner…but we’re also dealing with the very uncomfortable problem of his safe plays becoming a concern once again as they begin to crop up in a league that is both very fast and very unconcerned with the amount of damage they could potentially take from a backchecking defender.
Personally, I really really really hope it’s just his partner. I don’t want to have to think about Safe being Death again.