Can Simon Gagne Replace Jarome Iginla's Veteran Presence on the Boston Bruins?

Simon Gagne stepped onto the Boston Bruins' payroll Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after the team dropped its third straight regulation decision.

He stepped into the Boston lineup Wednesday night. The Bruins emerged from his debut with a resurgence of morale punctuated by head coach Claude Julien telling reporters that this was the team's “best game of the year so far.”

Only the staunchest of cynics can declare that sequence a stream of unadulterated happenstance. Putting in his first NHL appearance since April 2013, the 34-year-old walk-on wasted no time demonstrating his spark-plug capabilities.

Given the rust on his skill set and the fact that he is past his peak, there is no denying the limitations on those capabilities. However, limitations are not tantamount to nonexistence.

Granted, no one should expect Gagne to function as a long-term replacement for Jarome Iginla’s first-line firepower following the power forward's departure for Colorado. Not even after his stimulating near-miss in the final minute of Wednesday’s regulation segment while working with David Krejci and Milan Lucic.

Still, the way he improvised when Julien made a late tweak in a clutch situation emits flickers of promise, at worst. At the time, the Bruins were on the cusp of at least ending their pointless skid with a 2-2 draw with Detroit in hand.

That was when the following unfolded, as recounted by the Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont:

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Julien finally chopped his forward corps to three lines in the final five minutes of regulation. He popped Gagne up to the top trio, where he supplanted Seth Griffith ...

The shortened bench approach didn’t produce a tiebreaking goal, but it came close, Gagne denied a stellar chance at an open net, stopped when Red Wings goalie Jimmy Howard covered the shot with a late glove stop.

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That was, in essence, the end of the beginning of the 801-game veteran’s Spoked-B tenure. He made the most of a little in a game that saw him log 12 minutes and 13 seconds over 17 shifts.

He did not leave a direct imprint on the scoreboard, leaving his mates to claim their victory in a shootout. But it is hard to argue that Gagne did not generate an infectious blend of conviction and determination in Wednesday’s climactic phases.

After Thursday’s 6-4 loss in Montreal, the Bruins are still searching for their first regulation win since opening night. But they did keep the game mildly interesting when they whittled a 5-3 deficit down to 5-4.

With 5:49 to spare in the third period, none other than Gagne tipped home Boston’s fourth strike. His two credited assistants: Lucic and Krejci.

So it was not all back to reality in Gagne’s second outing with the Bruins. If anything, reality may be surfacing as a little more compatible with fantasy.

Odds are Gagne will not be garnering 70-plus repeats of these productive or near-productive late-game scenarios like he has in the middle of this week.

While he will not replace Iginla’s skill set—let alone production in any category—he can still lend a useful veteran presence to a team that cannot hurt from it. As long as the Bruins do not overuse Gagne, he can provide a measure of developmental relief to the younger crop of the strike force.

The long-term makeup of Boston’s bottom line is as mysterious as that of its top troika. Jordan Caron, Matt Fraser, Griffith and Ryan Spooner have all seen action in one row of the depth chart or the other.

With Gregory Campbell putting in his first appearance of the 2014-15 season Thursday, Griffith was the only one of those four homegrown youngsters in action.

Campbell will presumably assume his standard fourth-line pivot position. That leaves the various youngsters to compete with Gagne for one of the two right-wing openings on the game roster.

With Iginla gone and a salary-cap strap chafing them, the best the Bruins can do to replenish his talent and seasoning is to seek one of those elements at a time. Gagne’s best years are behind him, whereas his internal competitors have yet to fully blossom.

With that said, if he is to dress on a nightly basis—and assuming everyone is healthy—the Bruins can employ 11 veterans of at least one full 82-game NHL season up front.

Even if he remains of fourth-line caliber, Gagne can partner with Daniel Paille and Campbell to keep the troika fully grizzled.

At the same time, there might be a few more sporadic and spontaneous occurrences like those from late Wednesday and Thursday. Julien may again want to swap out a fresher face working on a higher unit in favor of someone with more of a clutch track record at this level.

For Gagne, the worst-case scenario therefore entails serving as short-order insurance while otherwise filling supplementary minutes—hardly a thorough replacement for Iginla, but maybe a way to slow down the Boston offense’s aggregate age regression.

The active hunger that brought mixed results on back-to-back nights will be something to feed off of as well.

Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics for this report were found via NHL.com. Salary-cap information courtesy of CapGeek.com.