NHL Notebook: Trent Frederic helping Oilers on their 'mission'

That’s much more than the one regular season game he was able to play in for Edmonton before aggravating his ankle injury and then subsequently sitting on the shelf until the start of the playoffs.

“I feel like I got here and this team has been on an absolute mission,” said Frederic to NHL.com prior to the start of the Cup Final. “Their eyes are on one thing and it’s the Stanley Cup. We’ve gotten better and better with each round.

“To beat [the Panthers] you’ve got to do everything well and play good team defense. At the end of the day, they play a pretty simple hockey style and you’ve just got to play well to beat them.”

One other big part of beating the Panthers, particularly for a guy like Frederic, is locking up against a beloved former teammate in Brad Marchand, who was the 26-year-old’s captain for most of the last two seasons. Now Frederic could absolutely find himself in a position where he’s got to after No. 63 if something goes awry on the ice, or find himself as a face-licking victim if things really devolve on the ice.

It's interesting insight, though, to hear Frederic talking about how living up to Marchand’s standard was a big concern of his while both were still in Boston, a sign that there was a growing, frustrating divide between the left winger’s expectations and what his teammates were able to deliver.

“Just weird. It’s gonna be weird [lining up against Marchand]. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it. We competed together for a long time and [Brad Marchand] was an older guy and the captain,” said Frederic. “I was always trying to match his expectations and do anything for him. If you asked me 10 months ago, I would have jumped on a grenade for him and now it’s the exact opposite. But that’s the hockey world.”

The big question facing Frederic, of course, is what’s going to happen with him in free agency after a down season where he posted just eight goals and 15 points, with things going really wrong for him in Boston prior to getting traded. That’s a far cry from the 17 goals and 36 points that he averaged in the previous two seasons while playing a pretty effective, if not always consistent, middle-6 power forward role for the Black and Gold.

There have been whispers that Frederic may re-sign with the Oilers after they invested a good deal to get him from Boston, and there’s always a chance that a return to his hometown of St. Louis could be in the offing as well. The reality, though, is that his value will have certainly gone down after a so-so season and some team could get a deal on a player that’s young enough to still develop into that rugged and intimidating 20-goal power forward that every team is searching for across the NHL.

And a strong finish to the Stanley Cup Final could help both Frederic and the Oilers in a series that is anybody’s to win with Game 3 set for Monday night in Florida.

ONE TIMERS

 • Interesting to note how the Bruins operated at the NHL scouting combine in Buffalo last week, interviewing 74 of the 90 prospects in attendance at the combine and taking several out to dinner for extended conversations as they do due diligence with the top young hockey prospects before making the No. 7 overall pick in the draft in just a couple of weeks.

“The Combine is an opportunity for us to get to meet a number of these kids off the ice,” said Bruins Director of Amateur Scouting Ryan Nadeau to the media in Buffalo prior to returning from the combine. “We see them so much playing hockey and at the rink, but now we get to know them a little bit and ask them some questions and just get a better feel for the personality of the kid.

“We’ve got to be pretty direct and concise. At the same time, we try and keep it comfortable so the kids don’t feel too intimidated and are going to answer the questions and give us a little background and insight into why they play hockey, what’s driving them forward, and different things that we can find out that have helped these kids get to a spot where they are now in consideration to be drafted into the NHL.”

Boston College forward James Hagens interviewed with the Bruins midweek and enjoyed his chat with B’s personnel, though it’s assumed that he is going to be gone by the time Boston makes their pick.

“It was awesome. They are great people and easy to talk to,” said Hagens of his meeting with the Bruins. “There are a lot of connections because of the couple of Bruins guys on our roster this year. Being able to connect about that, talk about the guys on our team, how they’ve done, they’re great people. It was a really great conversation we had.”

Brady Martin is one player to watch as the B’s took him out to dinner during combine week, and he said he “looks up to Sam Bennett, Tom Wilson and Matthew Knies” when figuring out what his style of play is going to be. The Soo Greyhounds forward may have somewhat of a ceiling on his overall offensive skill level (and he’s only 6-foot tall and 174 pounds currently), but the personality and his hard-nosed aspirations are exactly what the Bruins should be looking for at this point.

 • It’s close to the dog days of summer for most general sports websites with the NHL and NBA seasons winding to a close and Major League Baseball about to be the only major sport playing actual games a few weeks from now.

So websites like Awful Announcing come up with rankings designed to generate conversation and reading eyeballs, and this past week they ranked the NHL’s TV broadcasting crews for each of the 32 NHL markets. The Bruins announcing duos on NESN have not fared well in recent rankings, in part due to Jack Edwards’ unique and bombastic style prior to his retirement that home fans adored and out-of-market fans did not, and this season they were again ranked at the bottom of the NHL.

On the plus side, the ranking for the Bruins tandem of Judd Sirott and Andy Brickley was markedly higher than the last few years of Brickley and Edwards, and many Awful Announcing readership voters welcoming the change in the TV voice of the Boston Bruins with several finding Sirott a step up from Edwards, with lines like “a huge upgrade,” “a major improvement,” “a breath of fresh air,” and “so much better.”

Some were not quite as complimentary in their assessments, but it can often take time for a television broadcast duo to build the kind of chemistry that can make a television broadcast sing. Brick has always been both a fan favorite and a hockey voice that brings a ton of knowledge and know-how into every broadcast. There’s also the added challenge of working through one of the worst Bruins seasons of the last 20 years, which adds to the degree of difficulty for hockey talkers trying to liven up blowout losses or spice up late regular-season games with nothing on the line for the Black and Gold.