What Charlie McAvoy said about Bruins’ vacant captaincy role
"Regardless of letters, we know that this is our team, me and him. And for however many years we get to be here, it’s going to be us two, along with a lot of other guys, right?"
The Boston Bruins, as currently constituted, are without a captain entering the 2025-26 season.
The last player to don the “C” on a black-and-gold sweater was Brad Marchand — who was traded to Florida in March, won a Cup with the Panthers, and then re-upped with Boston’s rival on a six-year contract extension weeks later.
As the Bruins attempt to pen a new chapter and retool around a new core grouping moving forward, most eyes look to Charlie McAvoy and David Pastrnak as the next wave of team leadership.
Beyond Pastrnak and McAvoy’s standing as two of the top players in the NHL, both skaters have also established themselves as alternate captains with Boston over the last few seasons.
But as the Bruins mull their options when it comes to establishing a new leadership hierarchy moving forward, McAvoy stressed in an interview with the Boston Herald’s Steve Conroy that there isn’t any rush to name a captain for next season.
Rather, the Bruins defenseman believes that the franchise will be in good hands with both him and Pastrnak working together to help lead Boston back to the playoffs.
“Going into this year, we’re both going to have A’s. That’s what I know,” McAvoy told Conroy. “I don’t think there’s any fire under them to do anything with that [captaincy role]. And guess what? That’s totally fine.”
“And regardless of letters, we know that this is our team, me and him. And for however many years we get to be here, it’s going to be us two, along with a lot of other guys, right,” McAvoy added. “But this is our baby now, me and him, and there’s nobody else that I’d rather do it with and I know we’re going to make each other better, on and off the ice.”
While McAvoy spent the final months of the 2024-25 season on the mend due to a shoulder injury and infection, Pastrnak served as Boston’s top leader over a painful final stretch of the year.
But even with Pastrnak taking a more vocal role in Boston’s dressing room while still stuffing the stat sheet (43 goals, 106 points over 82 games), the Bruins’ star winger also stressed this spring that he isn’t focusing on titles such as the captaincy moving forward.
“The leaders I had around me, it was never about who wears the ‘C’ or who wears the ‘A’. Everybody in the room is equal here and we need to make sure that that’s one of the things that we have to [find] — a group that is willing to put the work in,” Pastrnak said during the team’s break-up day in April. “It’s not about one guy.
“It’s going to be multiple of us and we need to be working together, and it doesn’t matter who’s going to end up wearing any letter, but it starts with a group. Everybody’s equal here no matter if you’re young, older, and that’s what it’s always been like, and we have to keep it going.”
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