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As playoffs near, doubt the 2025-26 Bruins at your own riskĀ
"They never give up. Never. I'm just happy for them.ā
COMMENTARY
Days before the 2025-26 Bruins season commenced, team president Cam Neely expressed confidence in Boston’s efforts to pull itself out of last season’s disastrous tailspin.
“We got guys that are going to be tough to play against, hard to play against,” Neely noted. “I think teams are going to circle playing against the Bruins and go — ‘Oh, damn, we’ve got to play them tonight.’”
Of course, Neely’s optimism is par for the course for any NHL exec on the outset of a new campaign. And, frankly, a roster whose identity is rooted in doling out welts doesn’t always translate to success in the standings.
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Don Sweeney’s decision to uproot the roster at the trade deadline replenished Boston’s prospect pool and put an arduous rebuild ahead of schedule.
But any talk of the Bruins being a legitimate playoff-caliber club this spring felt like a reach for a depth chart still pockmarked with a multitude of questions.
On paper, the criticisms were valid about Boston’s ceiling as a difference-maker in the East. But in practice, Neely found few faults with the type of hockey Marco Sturm was going to preach in his first year as bench boss.
“Our guys did a really good job of putting a roster together that is going to give us that piss and vinegar,” Neely said. “It’s going to be hard to play against, and teams aren’t going to enjoy it.”
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Count the Columbus Blue Jackets as the latest team to recoil at the sight of the spoked-B echted onto their calendar Sunday.
With eight games left in the regular season, the 2025-26 Bruins have lived up to Neely’s “piss and vinegar” proclamation.
It’s an identity that Sturm and a scrappy squad of youngsters, glass-eaters, journeymen, cast-offs, and a few foundational pieces have embraced in a roller-coaster year.
A year that — after Sunday’s comeback win in Columbus — seems destined to carry over into the postseason after just a brief one-year hiatus.
“I’m just very proud of my guys,” Sturm said of his club after Sunday’s 4-3 shootout victory at Nationwide Arena. “They never give up. Never. I’m just happy for them.”
For all of the talk of this team’s flaws — unsustainable underlying D-zone metrics, regression-ready shooting luck, or a “Murderer’s Row” of late-season foes — Boston keeps clearing hurdles.
In the span of a little over a week, the Bruins have seemingly collected several statement victories.
There was a 4-2 road win in Detroit on March 21, with Jeremy Swayman stopping 42 shots to help bolster Boston’s playoff odds beyond a 50-50 coin flip.
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A day after an ugly home loss to the cellar-dwelling Leafs, the Bruins went into Buffalo against the hottest team in the NHL and rallied back for a 4-3 win off an OT tally from Pavel Zacha.
On Saturday, the Bruins toppled a Western Conference titan in the Wild, with six different Boston skaters posting multi-point games in a 6-3 victory.
And just 24 hours later, the Bruins erased a three-goal deficit with just 13:32 left in regulation — storming back and shocking a red-hot Columbus team also scrapping with Boston in the Eastern Conference playoff picture.
“We have to have a game like tonight,” Charlie McAvoy said. “We’re down three going into the third, and we come back and win? Then you have belief in it.”
Sunday’s rally was seemingly an encapsulation of what has made Sturm’s club now staring at nearly 92 percent odds of punching its ticket to the playoffs (per MoneyPuck).
Despite a turnover-ridden opening 20 minutes where Boston relinquished three goals, Sturm stuck with Jeremy Swayman for the rest of the night.
Starting back-to-back games for the first time since November 2021, the Vezina Trophy candidate responded by stopping the final 12 shots that came his way, including two critical stops in the shootout round.
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“He was our best player, but I didn’t want to [pull him]. I didn’t want to give up,” Sturm said of keeping Swayman in net.
“I didn’t want to lose that fight,” he added.
In need of a spark, Tanner Jeannot and Mark Kastelic provided said piss and vinegar in the first, dropping the gloves with 6-foot-5 Erik Gudbranson and feared pugilist Mathieu Olivier, respectively, in bouts just six seconds apart.
The result? A few bloodied knuckles. Some loose chiclets. An early exit for Olivier. And a much-needed wake-up call for Boston.
“We just have so much respect for those guys when they do that. … That was the spark of life we needed,” McAvoy said.
McAvoy — one of the pillars of Boston’s on-ice success this season alongside Swayman and David Pastrnak — made it a 3-1 game with a shot through a screen at 6:29 in the third.
The “Island of Misfit Skaters” then went to work. A power-play tally from Zacha made it a one-goal game with 11:17 to go.
And with just 11 seconds left on the clock and Boston pushing in a frantic 6-on-4 sequence, Viktor Arvidsson forced a turnover in Grade-A ice — with Zacha rifling the skittering biscuit past Jet Greaves for the equalizer.
It marked Zacha’s 13th goal in the 17 games since the Bruins returned from the Olympic break, as well as Arvidsson’s fifth point of the weekend slate.
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And in the shootout, it was the 21-year-old Fraser Minten — now entrusted in a top-line-center role by Sturm — who scored Boston’s first shootout goal before Arvidsson sealed the two points with a slick backhand tally.
Arvidsson, acquired from the Oilers last summer for a 2027 fifth-round pick, now has 21 goals and 47 points in 62 games with Boston this season. Altogether, Boston’s second line of Zacha, Arvidsson, and Casey Mittelstadt is now outscoring teams, 38-16, at 5-on-5 action.
In five days, the Bruins have collected six out of a possible six points against some of the toughest opponents in the NHL.
The 2025-26 Bruins are far from a juggernaut. They may not be favored against whoever they draw in a potential first-round bout.
But said foe isn’t going to be thrilled to see the Bruins lined up against them in the coming weeks.
What the Bruins might lack in outright talent, they have certainly made up for in resilience, toughness, a locked-in goalie, and plenty of motivated skaters ready to pull on the rope.
In hockey, those traits can take you a long way in the springtime.
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