A winger, a goalie and a 1b. I'm also not a guy who thinks McAvoy is a top 5 D - his play is okay in the post-season but not nearly enough. He's not in the Makar, Fox, Hedman, Heiskanen tier to me.
One or two signings like say, Elias Lindholm, don't put you guys back into contention. There's nothing serious in the pipeline coming to help. The Bruins failure over the past decade has been directly related to not having the top end playmaking it takes to win it all, via poor drafting or poor trades.
A piece or two away? Good luck.
Another thing that needs to be said about their regular season accomplishments and I say this as a long time Devils fan who watched a similar team post lockout and post-Niedermayer: the system and the culture get you through the season but it's not enough come playoff time. You need more gamebreaking offensive talent to keep going on and having a top 2 sniper is not enough. They don't have that Kucherov, Kane, Eichel, etc. and most cup winners have that guy, except the Blues who had solid scorers throughout the lineup in Steen, Thomas, Perron, etc. It's not a surprise their only cup came with a historic performance by Thomas. Swayman was the only reason they were still in this one.
And about that record-breaking season a year prior: it was a great accomplishment but it's tempered by the fact that a post-COVID cap constricted other competitive teams (who didn't get sweetheart deals from their core guys), 1/2 the league was aging out and also in cap trouble (PIT, WAS, etc) and the other half was too young with lost development time / still rebuilding, particularly in that Atlantic division where there were a lot of layup games (BUF, OTT, MTL, DET). They caught the right moment in history to do something epic but they were not actually a great team and it's not a surprise they choked it away.
You don't have to believe me. It's going to play out this way. You've seen it before in Calgary, Minnesota, Nashville, now Winnipeg, etc. Those fans also told me how they'd re-tool and build around what was left.
