Brad Marchand doesn’t regret undergoing double hip surgery in May. He knows it was necessary to prolong his career.
That doesn’t mean everything has been smooth sailing this season, though. Marchand acknowledged on Wednesday that getting his game back to where he expects it to be remains a work-in-progress with 20 regular-season games remaining, and that it’s been a slower process than he anticipated.
“I thought I’d feel better now than I do, to be honest with you,” Marchand said. “I think it’s been great, it’s been really relieving that we have the team we have and we’re as deep as we are. That definitely takes pressure off. But I thought I’d be kind of where I was last year right now, and I don’t necessarily feel like that.
“So, I still have a little ways to go before playoffs. But surgery-wise, it was by far the best decision I made for the longevity of my career. I’m happy with how it went, and obviously the best-case scenario happened where we have a really good team and it takes a lot of the pressure off, but I thought it would be a little easier to get back to where I was last year than it’s been.”
Marchand is still averaging a point per game with 19 goals and 35 assists in 54 games, which puts him second on the team in scoring behind runaway leader David Pastrnak (84 points). But Marchand is used to producing even more than that, as he had been over a point per game in each of the previous six seasons.
Marchand said he does take some solace in the fact that he’s still putting up points, but that his feelings about his game go beyond point totals.
“A little bit, but I don’t really care about the points. It’s more about how I play,” he said. “If I feel like I had a really good game and I don’t have points, or I have three points and I had a bad game, I’m not happy. Points I think are more just a reflection of how good of a team we have. Everyone’s having success this year.
“I like to feel like I’m in control of the play when I’m on the ice, and I haven’t really felt like that this year like I have the last six or seven years. That’s kind of what I meant. I feel like my conditioning is where it needs to be to play that way. It’s tough to work on it with the schedule that we have, but you have to chip away at it. It just gets a little frustrating when I have an expectation to play a certain way and it’s not necessarily there yet.”
As Marchand himself said, the Bruins’ historic rate of winning this season has lessened some of the pressure on any one individual. In past seasons, when the Bruins weren’t as deep and often had to rely on one line to do much of their scoring, any dip in Marchand’s production would be more concerning. This year’s Bruins are much deeper, though, and have gotten more than enough offense from other lines and from their defensemen to make up for Marchand not quite being at the same level he’s used to.
And what could really be scary for opponents is that there’s still a chance that Marchand gets back to that truly elite level by the time the playoffs start.
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