After a long offseason for the Bruins, players started to gather back on the ice in Boston at Warrior Ice Arena on Tuesday for the team’s first captains practice. But, a major question looming over the day was what will the Bruins’ new leadership structure look like this year as their captains practice was notably captainless.
Since March, when former Bruins captain Brad Marchand was dealt to the Florida Panthers at the trade deadline, the Bruins have been without a captain, and that may continue into the 2025-26 season.
Two obvious candidates to take over the role are last year’s alternate captains, David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy, who both spoke after day one of captains practices about the subject of leadership and how they plan to approach it this season.
Both players echoed the same sentiment, that no matter who is captain (or if there is a captain named at all), it’s going to take more than just one leader to lift this year’s Bruins team back to where they want to be as a playoff contender.
”It’s going to be a group of leaders here, and our main focus is to bring the team together and be competitive every single night,” Pastrnak said.
And though it would certainly be different for the Bruins organization to have no captain, the approach to leadership as a group won’t be all that different than in the past, according to Pastrnak.
He explained that despite captains like Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand seemingly taking charge over the Bruins over the past decade, it really has been a wider coalition of leaders guiding the team behind the scenes.
“It’s never been about one guy here. I know it might have seemed like it many years before this with guys like Bergy and Z, but it was always a group decision,” Pastrnak said. “If you look at the big picture, it's the same. It’s always the leadership in this organization is not one guy, and it's been always a group of leaders.”
McAvoy echoed Pastrnak’s sentiment that this year’s team will need many leadership figures, not just a singular captain.
"I think it absolutely will be by committee, certainly to start, and I wouldn't be surprised throughout if we continue to bring people into the fold," McAvoy said.
“You can't do it alone,” he added. “Maybe from the outside it looked like that was it with Z and Bergy and them, but they leaned on everybody. I think the best groups tend to be the ones that you get it everywhere. You take a lot of that weight off your shoulders and you can put it on everybody else and the group is better for it.”
The good news for the Bruins is that they now have both Pastrnak and McAvoy healthy and able to lead on the ice going into the season, with McAvoy back to full strength after a shoulder injury ended his 2024-25 season in February.
Whether the Bruins give a “C” to one of them, both of them, or neither of them, it seems like Pastrnak and McAvoy are both on the same page about the philosophy of leadership being a team effort.