‘We found our identity’: Charlie McAvoy on how Bruins have turned around their season

Every team has peaks and valleys in an 82-game NHL season but, now in his eighth NHL season, Boston Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy has experienced something completely different from his first seven years. 

In recent campaigns, the Bruins have had tons of success from the beginning of the regular season all the way to the end without much adversity. So this season, when the team started 8-9-3, it was a feeling some of the veteran guys had not been used to. 

“Every year we’ve sort of won that ‘October Stanley Cup,’ being the best team out of the gate, at least it’s been like that the past couple of years,” McAvoy told Daily Faceoff. “It’s definitely been a learning experience this year. With a lot of turnover in the summer and coming into this year with a different team — honestly, the biggest thing is at the beginning of the year, the turnover in coach — the team going up and down, and up and down — sort of finding the mental ways to reset your ways to stay even keel, even when things are going good and bad. For the most part, it’s been good for most of my time here in Boston, and it’s good now, but there are times when — this year especially, learning experiences of how to deal with some of the adversity that comes.” 

McAvoy is in the prime of his career at 27 years of age and is now in the second year of wearing an “A” for this Original Six franchise as one of their alternate captains. Not only has his role on the ice gotten more significant over the years, but now that some of the big-name leaders like Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, and David Krejci are no longer in the room, McAvoy’s role has elevated as well. 

“I think you can add it up to just the turnover in guys,” McAvoy said. “We’ve always had a veteran group, whether it was Hallsy [Taylor Hall] or [Nick] Foligno, guys like that who are around. Then we had turnover, and last year, it was Shatty [Kevin Shattenkirk] and Riemer [James van Riemsdyk], those are 1,000-game guys, Shatty was damn near close. There was always a lot of experience; now we get it with Lindy [Elias Lindholm] and Z [Nikita Zadorov] and some other guys that have come, but I think there’s been added responsibility. It’s fine, I feel like I’m able to put it on my plate, and for me, it’s mostly just about showing and just working at it and leading by example.” 

This year’s Bruins group has had a different feel than the successful teams in years past, and there’s a certain expectation that comes with putting on that jersey. Over the past 15 years or so, the Bruins organization has had a certain identity that they’ve played with, but it took them a few months to get back to that in the 2024-25 campaign.

“Finding ways to win has been a little bit different,” McAvoy said. “We’ve obviously had a lack of offensive firepower this year, and we felt that across the board as a team.

“Because of that, when we’re unable to get it done we know what we need to do to win. And that’s team defense and that’s our goalies. We have a heck of a D-core and our forwards are defensively very responsible when we want to be. When we play the right way to our identity — we can keep the puck out of our net. We have two world-class goalies, so we know how we’re going to win games and we know what it looks like to get success and for us it’s all about defense. I think it makes our life easy, we know going into every game that that’s how we have to play.” 

Looking back at the beginning of the season, McAvoy has been able to find the good and the bad in what the team had gone through and is now using it as fuel for the rest of the regular season.

“This year, to have the trials and struggles that we went through, I think it was good. When you’re in it — you’re like, ‘This is really bad,’ and you’re feeling really down. That was one of the things that we tried to talk about: OK, we’re just going at it differently this year. I think history shows that there’s a lot of teams — a lot of good teams that have found their footing this time of year and grown that have had bad starts. I think that’s just one of the ways to find a positive in it, but yeah I think we found our identity, we know what we need to do and now we have a little bit of familiarity. We’re almost halfway here, so we know each other a lot better now and this team is only going to continue to get closer.” 

Since Joe Sacco has taken over as coach, the Bruins have fourth most points in the NHL, skating to a 12-7-1 record. They haven’t been perfect, but they have at least put themselves back in the conversation to compete with a lot of hockey left to be played.