Ian Mitchell excited to get a second chance to play for Bruins coach Jim Montgomery

When he went off to college at age 18, Ian Mitchell was understandably excited and eager to begin his NCAA career. A Western Canada kid, he chose the University of Denver over an offer to play for the Brandon Wheat Kings in the Western Hockey League, and the opportunity to play for coach Jim Montgomery was a main factor.

“Absolutely loved him — the best coach I ever had, without a doubt,” recalled Mitchell, who was acquired by the Bruins last month in the deal that sent Taylor Hall to the Blackhawks. “Hopefully I’ll have the chance to be reunited with him now. When I got the trade call, I couldn’t have been more excited. Great person. Great coach. I’ve got nothing but great things to say about what Monty’s meant to my career to this point.”

Mitchell, who this past week avoided salary arbitration by signing a one-year contract extension (one way, $775,000), played one season under Montgomery’s tutelage at Denver. Montgomery left after the 2017-18 season for his first crack at NHL coaching, hired as the Stars’ bench boss.

Mitchell, a 24-year-old right-shot defenseman, grew up in the small town of Calahoo, Alberta, some 45 minutes outside Edmonton. In April of Mitchell’s freshman year, three of his friends from home, all members of the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, were among 16 on the team bus to die following a horrific highway accident in Saskatchewan.

Only 19 at the time, Mitchell lost his closest pal, right wing Logan Hunter, along with left wing Conner Lukan and goalie Parker Tobin.

“All of us from Alberta . . . and all grew up kind of playing together,” Mitchell recalled recently. “Just a terrible event.”

In order to help Mitchell deal with his grief, Montgomery and his wife, Emily, welcomed him into their home. It served to underscore Mitchell’s belief that Montgomery cared as much about his players as people as he did their being part of the team.

“Right after the crash happened, he invited me over to his house to stay there for a few days, just to get me out of the dorms and be around family,” Mitchell said. “I’ll never forget what that scene was like, and what he did for me in a very difficult time in my life. Off the ice . . . his support of me has been immeasurable.”

Montgomery, the NHL’s coach of the year for 2022-23, was aware that the front office had Mitchell on their radar in the days leading up to the Hall trade.

“I gave [general manager Don Sweeney] my thoughts,” said Montgomery. “I told him, ‘Yeah, I’d like to work with [Mitchell] again.’ ”

Montgomery’s thumbnail profile of Mitchell: “A high-character person, high hockey sense, high compete, and a real good skater . . . he’s going to fit in well with the Bruins culture. A smart, skilled defenseman who moves the puck really well. It might take him a while. I don’t know how long before he gets to Boston, but he’s going to be a good one for us.”

Drafted 57th overall in 2017, Mitchell played three seasons with the Pioneers before turning pro in the spring of 2020. He spent most of his first pro season on the varsity blue line, played sparingly his second season, then was back in Chicago full time last season, though was hindered by a wrist injury for the first two months. Coached by Luke Richardson, Mitchell spent most of his time at five-on-five and helped on the power play.

When training camp opens in Brighton on Sept. 20, Mitchell will be vying for time on the No. 3 defense pairing, which currently projects to have Derek Forbort on the left and veteran free agent pickup Kevin Shattenkirk on the right. Others in the mix include Jakub Zboril, Alec Regula (obtained in the same trade as Mitchell) and possibly ex-Harvard standout Reilly Walsh (acquired from New Jersey). No shortage of candidates.

Mitchell, 5 foot 11 inches and 193 pounds, figures his skating and puck-moving skills are his calling card. He trains summers in Denver, joined there by Bruin Brandon Carlo and other NHLers, including Denver alums Troy Terry, Scott Mayfield, and Will Butcher. He plans to pack up at the start of September for the move to Boston.

“Everyone tells me I’m going to love it,” Mitchell said, his prior visits here only brief. “I’m excited to get going.”

Unless there’s a negotiated meeting of the minds in the next few days, Jeremy Swayman and the Bruins will enter the salary arbitration meat grinder July 29, followed by Trent Frederic’s hearing Aug. 1.

GM Don Sweeney, with some $5.4 million remaining in cap space, will have to rearrange the roster slightly if both players go through the process and are awarded paydays in excess of that number. Given the historical landscape across the league, odds favor a negotiated settlement in the hours leading up to both hearings.

On Wednesday, the Jets and Gabriel Vilardi, one of the key assets acquired in the Pierre-Luc Dubois trade with the Kings, avoided their hearing and settled on a two-year deal at $3.44 million annually, a four-fold bump for Vilardi, 23, who wrangled a meager $825,000 out of the Kings for last season after terming out of his entry-level contract.

The Golden Knights and arbitration-bound Brett Howden also settled Wednesday, negotiating a two-year pact that carries a $1.9 million cap hit. Vegas still has some slimming down to do, Howden’s deal leaving the team $4.15 million over the cap, even after moving Reilly Smith’s $5 million off the books last month for a Penguins third-round draft pick in 2024.

Maple Leafs goalie Ilya Samsonov, with slightly more experience than Swayman (131 games vs. 88), entered arbitration Friday in search of $4.9 million, slightly more than double the $2.4 million the Leafs offered.

A comparable spread for Swayman would be, say, $2 million-$4 million, the middle ground of which would be ideal from the Bruins’ perspective. It would set them up for the coming season with Swayman and partner Linus Ullmark, the returning Vezina winner, making a combined $8 million — slightly less than 10 percent of the cap ceiling ($83.5 million) to cover the most important position.

Frederic, with 198 games and 54 points, has termed out of his second contract after making $1.15 million last season. There is no all-things-being-equal equation in all of this, but something approaching Howden’s $1.9 million would seem a decent payday for Frederic, who was chosen two picks after Howden in the first round of the 2016 draft.

Howden, a Tampa Bay draft pick, has delivered .294 points per game at the NHL level, while Frederic has popped for .273.

They’re restless in Montreal. That’s not news, not after what is now a 30-year Cup drought for the Canadiens. Remember, Les Glorieux won it five times in their first 30 years, and rattled off a record five straight (1956-60) in what Habs fans considered normal times.

The reaction of the fan base was exceptionally nasty after last month’s decision by Jeff Gorton, Kent Hughes, et al, to use the fifth pick in the draft on David Reinbacher, a 6-foot-2-inch Austrian-born defenseman out of Switzerland’s top pro league. Let it not be overlooked that the kid literally has CH in his name.

The reaction: David who?!

Actually, it was more emotional than that, but we’re going by old-school Sunday newspaper rules. Habs fans had their minds set on the far more hyped Matvei Michkov, the Russian right winger who some believe could be the next Kirill Kaprizov (a fifth-round choice in 2015 by the Wild).

Michkov, who might not be able to break his contract in Russia for at least two more years, went No. 7 to the Flyers.

Reinbacher, with the size (6-2/185) and game that encouraged the Bruins to select Charlie McAvoy at No. 14 in 2016, got lambasted by Habs fans on social media, in part because he’s unknown, in part because he’s not Michkov, in part because of the aforementioned 30-year drought.

Every draft, unless it’s Connor McDavid at No. 1 to Edmonton in 2015 or even Connor Bedard at No. 1 to Chicago this year, places fans in a position of faith — the trust that a club’s infrastructure of talent assessment knows what it’s doing.

Faith and trust are low in Montreal, albeit only a year removed from the Canadiens delighting most everyone up there by using the No. 1 pick to select Juraj Slafkovsky, the highly-touted Slovak left wing. As a rookie, Slafkovsky proved that like most 18-year-olds, he’ll need time for his game to grow into its promise. He finished a modest 4-6–10 in 39 games, his season coming to an end in mid-January because of a lower-body injury.

Nick Bobrov, the former Bruins scout who is now co-director of amateur scouting for the Canadiens, reminded one and all in Nashville that it’s “not a trivial matter” that the Canadiens are trying to create and build a team culture — one they feel Reinbacher fits.

“We all watch the playoffs,” Bobrov added, “and for two months of the year we get reminded of what works and what wins [and] maybe we tend to forget that for 10 months.”

Unlike McAvoy, Reinbacher’s draft profile was low, to the point of being barely existent last summer. But it began to lift during his performance in the World Junior Championships last summer in Edmonton and throughout his second season playing for Kloten in the Swiss League. All things considered, the Canadiens felt Reinbacher was the best defenseman available.

Try not to “get caught up in shiny objects, I guess,” Bobrov recently told The Athletic, explaining the Canadiens’ decision-making process.

Prior to heading home for the summer, Reinbacher signed his entry-level contract, worth $6.35 million if he’s on Montreal’s roster for three full seasons. Like Leo Carlsson, the Swedish center who recently signed after being selected No. 2 by Anaheim, Reinbacher could play in North America for the coming season or remain in Europe.

Forwards Tomas Nosek and Tyler Bertuzzi played much different roles in the Bruins’ offense, and now both have moved on to new clubs for prices that have left some Black-and-Gold fans scratching their heads.

No need to scratch: in both cases, market forces in free agency played out much differently than either player expected.

Prior to prices sagging, especially at the top end of the market where Bertuzzi rightfully was shopping, Don Sweeney was in a position of having to secure bona fide NHL talent for the Bruins amid the annual mad merry-go-round July 1.

We can argue over what the likes of oldsters James van Riemsdyk, Milan Lucic, and KevinShattenkirk will offer. But while Bertuzzi and Nosek were shopping with deep pockets wide open, Sweeney opted to fill roster spots with guys willing to take huge late-career financial haircuts. Otherwise, he risked having to fill the lineup with kids who could have proven not quite ready for prime time.

Imagine the head scratching among the fan base if the record at the Christmas break read something like 11-19-2? Bad in normal times, but what about after a record-setting 65-12-5 campaign?

Nosek, who played here the last two seasons for a $1.75 million cap hit, on Wednesday finally grabbed what he could, a one-year, $1 million deal with the Devils. In a more typical market (perhaps to return next season?), the trusty Nosek, even as a fourth-liner, reasonably could have expected a modest bump of $500K, or perhaps a total of $5 million over two years.

A frustrated Bertuzzi, wise enough to spot where the market was headed, opted for a one-year deal with the Leafs July 2. Price: $5.5M, or less than a 20 percent hike over the $4.75 million cap hit he came to Boston with from Detroit — a deal he negotiated as a restricted free agent. Bertuzzi, remember, tied Brad Marchand (10 points) for the Bruins’ all-too-brief playoff run in April.

What was the secret sauce that led the Golden Knights to the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title?

“Ah, boy, tough question,’ said their coach, Bruce Cassisdy, the former Bruins bench boss, back on Cape Cod for the summer. “Because I thought we had good Bruins teams — and I’m sure they thought they had the best chance to win this year. I think it’s just elevating your game at the right time.”

For the Golden Knights, added Cassidy, timely goals across the lineup, along with timely saves, made the difference.

“”We were able to make the difference — making plays when we had to,” he said. “Some games I think we were just flat-out better than the other team, and other games we lost that we didn’t deserve to win. But in important games, we just made the play. And it wasn’t one guy — it was [Jonathan] Marchessault, Jack Eichel, [Ivan] Barbashev, [Chandler] Stephenson, [Mark] Stone, [Brett Howden], [Michael] Amadio scores in double OT. So I think you need stories like that, where everyone’s pitching in.”

By and large, the roster grew healthier as the postseason extended, contrary to standard playoff attrition. One exception was in net, where Adin Hill (11-4) picked up for an injured Laurent Brossoit (5-2). The Knights bucked conventional wisdom, essentially winning the Cup on the shoulders of two goalies who entered the postseason as career backups with no playoff experience.

“That conversation’s going to start changing here soon,” predicted Cassidy. “Colorado won with [Darcy] Kuemper and used their other guy [Pavel Francouz] along the way, too, so maybe it’s not like you need your Patrick Roy and Marty Brodeur from years ago, where they’re going to carry the team. Yes, you need good goaltending, but I think general managers are looking at that and maybe you won’t see the big deals for the goalies like maybe you did years ago.”

For the 11th year running, the Bruins will dispatch their rookies to Buffalo for the Prospects Challenge, this year with Montreal, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and New Jersey in the September mixer. The WannaB’s open against the Penguins on Sept. 15, face the Canadiens on Sept. 16, then close it out Sept. 18 against the Devils. Varsity camp then opens two days later in Brighton . . . The 2003 draft that delivered Patrice Bergeron at No., 45 to the Bruins, also brought them Alaska-born Nate Thompson at No. 183. Thompson, who played last season for AHL Ontario, called it a career Thursday after 844 NHL games, four of those with the Bruins. His sweater collection also includes the Islanders, Lightning, Ducks, Senators, Kings, Canadiens, Flyers, and Jets . . . Ross Colton, ex- of the University of Vermont and the Lightning, signed a four-year extension with the Avalanche with a $4 million cap hit — big leap over the $1.125 million he made with Tampa Bay. Technically, that put the Avalanche well over the cap, but with Gabriel Landeskog ($7 million cap hit) expected hors de combat for the season, Colorado should fit comfortably under the $83.5 million threshold . . . Nosek in New Jersey will join an expanding group of former Bruins that includes Erik Haula and Curtis Lazar up front and Dougie Hamilton and Colin Miller on defense.