February 23, 2025 | 5:41pm ET
By Shawn Hutcheon, TheFourthPeriod.com

PLAYOFF RACE BEGINS FOR BRUINS, WITHOUT HAMPUS LINDHOLM

Charlie McAvoy, defenceman

BOSTON, MA — They’re back. After watching some of the most thrilling hockey any of us will ever see thanks to the 4 Nations Face-Off, the Boston Bruins have returned to action. The question is, for how long?

Boston is in the unusual position of being out of a playoff spot with just 24 games (in the next 51 days) remaining on the schedule.

If you were focusing on the 4 Nations Face-Off – and who wasn’t – let me give you a little reminder that in the Eastern Conference, there is a seven-team logjam for two postseason spots. The Bruins are one of those teams.

To qualify for the postseason in the Eastern Conference, the Bruins (27-24-7, 61 points) will need to play playoff-style hockey for the rest of the season.

“We gotta treat every game like a playoff game,” Bruins center Elias Lindholm said after his team dropped a 3-2 overtime decision to the Anaheim Ducks on Saturday. “It’s 24 games left, we need to win a lot of games to be able to get in but we can’t look too far ahead. Every game is super important for us right now.”

At this point, there is no way to predict whether Boston will extend its season past Game 82. They are in a battle for a wild card position with no fewer than seven teams (Detroit Red Wings, Ottawa Senators, Columbus Blue Jackets, New York Rangers, New York Islanders, Montreal Canadiens, and Philadelphia Flyers). Those teams are separated by a total of five points in the standings.

As of Sunday, Detroit and Ottawa held the wild card spots – but that can change or it may not. Most likely, we will not know which teams will move on to the Stanley Cup playoffs until the last day of the season or darned close to it.

Until then, interim head coach Joe Sacco and his staff do not want the players to look at the schedule and think that they need to win every one of those 24 games or their season will be over. The coaches are preaching a smaller set of schedules with the goal being to win the majority of the games in those mini-schedules.

“You can break it (schedule) down into small increments which is something we’re going to look at doing,” Sacco said when the team reconvened after the break. “Whether it be three-game series or four games, we’ll take a look at that to break the schedule down a little bit smaller for our guys to look at. I don’t know the exact number of what it’s going to take (to get into the playoffs). No one can predict it. I think we have an idea but let’s look short-term. Let’s look at two or three games - like I said - as a group. Try to take care of business in those situations then move on to the next segment. I think that’s a good way for us to approach this stretch run, if you want to call it that with just under a third of the regular season left.”

Boston’s captain Brad Marchand rejoined his team two days after winning the 4 Nations championship with Team Canada and played in the game versus Anaheim. After the contest, he spoke about the importance of breaking down the schedule.

“The big thing is to take it day by day,” Marchand said. “You can’t start looking ahead. Every game is important, every point is important. We know that we’re in a dogfight until the end, so it’s just about coming to the rink every day, excited for the opportunity, and try to be excited about working our way to the final end and doing the job. It’s not going to be perfect all the way through but we have to continue to come in and try to be better each day and give ourselves the best opportunity to get in.”

Compounding the dogfight of which Marchand spoke, are the injuries to the club’s two top defensemen, Charlie McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm.

As we all saw, McAvoy sustained a shoulder injury while playing for Team USA in the 4 Nations Face-Off requiring his being hospitalized for an irrigation and debridement procedure which (if you have not looked it up) is - according to medical websites (WebMD, Mayo Clinic) - arthroscopic surgery where infected tissue is removed from the joint. According to those same sites, the recovery time from such an operation can be anywhere from four weeks to four months.

Sunday morning, Bruins GM Don Sweeney met with the media and issued updates on McAvoy and Lindholm.

“Very happy to report that Charlie’s doing better, out of the hospital, as you saw in his attendance at 4 Nations, and doing better at home,” he said. “No timeline (on his return) as regards to his surgery to his shoulder but, again, doing much, much better. We’ll let the healing take place and make sure the infection stuff is gone and be re-evaluated. I’ll let (Bruins physician) Dr. Asnis and Charlie determine the course of action and the timeline necessary for him to fully heal.”

Lindholm suffered a fractured patella while blocking a shot in a game at St. Louis on November 12. According to Sweeney, the blueliner’s season is over.

“Hampus, unfortunately, is unlikely to return for the rest of the season,” Sweeney said. “As everyone knows, he had a significant knee injury. He fractured his patella, had surgery. There was no definitive timeline because of the complexity of the injury. He’s going to have a follow-up next week to remove a bit of the hardware because it created some irritation as he was going through the rehab. The healing process has gone long and has gone well. He’ll have no setbacks moving forward. That being said, it’s going to take a little more time for him to heal naturally and we just don’t want to put a timeline on when he’ll be back to one hundred percent. It’s more constructive to allow him to not continue to push the way he had been pushing.”

In the meantime, the Bruins cannot, and will not, dwell on what could have been with their two best defenders in the lineup.

It is imperative that the Black and Gold returns to being a team that is hard to play against. That was their trademark for many seasons and they enjoyed success because of it. This year’s 3.17 goals against per game is the 24th-best in the 32-team League. That is not good enough for a team striving to make the playoffs.

“There needs to be more of an emphasis on our team game,” said Sacco. “That’s just the way it needs to be. When we’re tight defensively, when we’re giving up less opportunities and not making it so hard on our goalies, I think that’s when we’re at our best and we need to get back to that. We need a collective effort from everybody. We all have to be able to raise our level now.”