Nikita Zadorov was confident he was going to be a good fit on the Boston Bruins. Before he signed with them on July 1, 2024, he asked some people who were familiar with the team and the city just to make sure.
“They said, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’” Zadorov told WEEI.com on Thanksgiving morning. “Because I think people appreciate the hard work, people appreciate physicality here, and people appreciate the emotions and the care, and that's what I want to bring every night.”
It might not have been immediately clear to fans and media that this was going to be a good fit, though. Zadorov’s Bruins career did not get off to the most promising start, mainly because he just could not stay out of the penalty box at the start of last season, racking up a whopping eight minor penalties in his first seven games. The team was struggling, too. Criticism of the six-year, $30 million contract Zadorov had signed began before he even had time to settle in.
“People thought my contract was bad before I even signed the contract,” Zadorov said with a bit of a smile.
A year later, that contract isn’t looking so bad after all. In fact, it’s looking quite good given what Zadorov has brought to the 2025-26 Bruins so far.
On the ice, he has played more minutes than any other Bruins skater. His 22:02 average time on ice is nearly a minute and a half higher than his previous career high. He leads the team in shorthanded ice time as well, playing a big role on a Boston penalty kill that ranks top 10 in the NHL – while killing more penalties than any other team. He leads the team in hits, too.
Most importantly, Zadorov is simply playing very good defense. On a 5-on-5, per-60-minutes basis, he ranks first among Bruins defenseman in shot attempts against, shots on goal against, and expected goals against. He is second in actual goals against behind only Jonathan Aspirot, who has been Zadorov’s defensive partner for most of the last six games. And he is doing it while getting heavy defensive-zone usage, starting more shifts there than any other Bruin this season.
Off the ice, Zadorov has emerged as one of the Bruins’ core leaders. He was not wearing a letter to start the season, but he has been wearing an alternate captain’s ‘A’ since Charlie McAvoy went down with a facial injury on Nov. 15. That leadership has become even more important this past week with David Pastrnak, another captain, missing the last two games.
“We need him. We need him,” Bruins coach Marco Sturm said of Zadorov on Saturday night. “Sometimes it's almost like he plays too much. But overall, yeah, he knows it too, with Charlie out, that he needs to be the guy. … It's a challenge for a big guy like him, playing a lot of minutes, so he needs to make sure that he's going to stay consistent throughout a shift, period, game, every night. I think that's something he's learning too.”
Zadorov is also becoming more of a fan favorite and face of the team. He stepped up in McAvoy’s absence in another way on Thanksgiving morning, delivering pies to the homeless at Boston’s St. Francis House and Pine Street Inn along with his wife and three kids. That has long been a Bruins tradition, and one that McAvoy had taken ownership of in recent years – until being sidelined by his injury this year.
That Zadorov would step up like this – both on and off the ice – was not a given. Zadorov actually played well in the second half last season, but the belief among many on the outside was that he was being asked to play too much with both McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm out of the lineup. The thinking was that he would benefit from a bit of a reduced role slotting in behind those two this season.
Well, the Bruins have not had the benefit of a fully healthy blue line for much of this season. McAvoy has now missed eight games. Lindholm missed eight earlier in the season. So, no reduced role for Zadorov, even if that’s something Sturm might have had in mind. Instead, Sturm has leaned on Zadorov to play over 26 minutes in three of the Bruins’ last five games. Those rank as three of the top 10 regular-season games in Zadorov’s 13-year career in terms of ice time.
Zadorov, for his part, never assumed he was going to play less this season. Instead, he spent the summer making sure he would be ready to handle whatever Sturm had in mind for him. Now, he feels like he is playing some of the best hockey of his career.
“I think I am, yeah,” he said. “I take pride, obviously, when the coach is trusting you, that your team is trusting you to be on the ice in every situation. I take pride in it. Obviously, we can’t stay out of the box, so the PK ice time goes up a little bit more and some nights I have to play 25, 27 minutes, just because of the PK and all those situations, defensive zone faceoffs. But I’ve been feeling great. Worked really extremely hard in the summer to be in the situation where I'm at today.”
Off the ice, Zadorov acknowledges that he wasn’t quite a perfect fit with his new teammates right from Day 1. He credits the rest of Boston’s leadership group with helping him fit in and find his voice, including having him be a part of their discussions this past summer about the direction they wanted to take this team.
“It takes time to adjust, and I'm not the quickest into it,” Zadorov said. “It took me a little bit of time to get to know my teammates, get to know the city, organization, identity. I thought a lot of guys in the room and a lot of guys from the leadership group, like Charlie, like David, both Lindholms, they helped me a lot to adjust.
“And then, obviously it wasn't the season we wanted last year. When we were talking over the summer, what we want to fix and how we want to approach this year, it was a clear message: We want to be a really hard to team to play against. And when the whole team buys in, it's easy to blend in here. So, I think that's the hockey I love playing, and that's the hockey people love seeing here.”
They do, and they’re starting to love what they’re seeing from Zadorov more and more. He was always confident they would, even if it took a little bit of time.
“I knew I was going to prove everybody wrong,” he said.