When asked about their favorite game atmospheres, National Hockey League players usually mention the Bell Centre, but it’s become the house of horrors for Charlie McAvoy.
If Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney is on the phone this week, he’s trying to identify an available, experienced, right-shot defenseman he can acquire and not only to band-aid the gaping hole left by No. 1 defenseman.
Rink Rap has never shared the widespread fandom for hyperactive defensemen like MacKenzie Weegar, above, but with Charlie McAvoy sidelined indefinitely after surgery on his jaw and Henri Jokiharju falling out of favor with coach Marco Sturm, it’s become imperative that the Bruins address their right side.
First and foremost and stop me (oh ho-ho, stop me…) if you’ve heard this one before, the one player the Bruins cannot do without and still make the playoffs is not necessarily David Pastrnak or Jeremy Swayman but McAvoy, for whom no timetable has been set following surgery on his jaw made necessary by a puck to the face during the Bruins’ victory Saturday night in Montreal.
It was on the same rink last winter during the 4 Nations tournament that McAvoy was severely injured, his right shoulder maimed on a dirty hit from behind by Finland winger Joel Armia (then a member of the Montreal Canadiens). The crosscheck was post-whistle, and McAvoy was lucky his head didn’t hit the goal post first. The National Hockey League’s hands were tied, holding no disciplinary jurisdiction during the International Ice Hockey Federation event. The act submarined the Bruins’ season. Armia has carried his bottom-six career to Los Angeles and is expected to be in the Kings’ lineup when the Bruins visit on Friday night (10:30 pm ET faceoff), the second game of a four-game road trip that begins tonight in Anaheim (10 pm ET faceoff).
“Why (McAvoy)?” Mike Milbury once asked Rink Rap during the strange juxtaposition of his radio show a couple of years ago. It was a little weird, the former NHL defenseman, coach and general manager doing the interview and me fielding the questions.
Answer: A few things on a short list that just expanded by the Bruins’ impossible task of mitigating this absence on a one-for-one basis.
The minute-munching, dynamic, offensive/defensive, game-driving defenseman is always going to be one of the more important players, if not most important, in any hockey game. For almost half the game, this player retrieves pucks, gets them to the forwards in good spots, joins the attack, sometimes even originates the attack, all the while needing fantastic recovery skills. The No. 1 D, if he’s his team’s primary PMD (and McAvoy is), leverages elite skills on the game. At a national event, I once had a junior-age coach tell me his first interest in any opponent is, “Who’s their Bobby Orr?” Identifying that defenseman was the beginning of game-planning.
On the negative end of the equation, a No. 1 defenseman gets more minutes and touches per game than any other player on his team, and his coach tries to match him up against the opponent’s top forward line. If a team’s No. 1 defenseman plays poorly, there is almost no such thing as winning that game or playoff series (a bad No. 1 D generally takes his goalie with him to the bottom of the ocean). The role requires the ability to shake off the bad moments but, just as importantly, requires a passion for the sport that translates into a career-long honing of the craft.
Plus-minus: still a useful (results-based) statistic, especially for high-minutes defensemen. It doesn’t tell you everything, but then again, what stat does? Every measuring stick this side of wins is destined for the garbage heap. Exactly like the rest of them. I digress.
After McAvoy played his first game since 4 Nations, he was giddy with excitement. The man loves hockey, so this is another massive blow during the early days of what should be his prime years.
When McAvoy hurried off the ice with help from the Canadiens’ training staff through the home team’s bench door, the Bruins were left with one right-handed shot on their blue line: Andrew Peeke.
Chosen 34th overall by the Columbus Blue Jackets in the same 2016 draft that saw McAvoy go in the first round to Boston, Peeke plays a very simple game and plays it effectively. A big (6-foot-3, 214 pounds), strong, willing combatant, Peeke has won a top-four job in Coach Marco Sturm’s aggressive man-coverage system.
In the first fundamental departure from the zone-containment system that Claude Julien gave the Bruins back in 2007, calming their chaos and eventually winning the Stanley Cup, Sturm has his defenseman aggressively pursue puck carriers in Boston’s defensive zone.
Peeke’s game is far from pretty, but he’s got a good head on his shoulders and is ultra competitive. If there was a clubhouse leader for NESN’s 7th Player Award that (at the end of the season) goes to the Bruin who performs above expectations, there is no better candidate as of Nov. 19, 2025.
A Peeke has increased and Henri Jokiharju has decreased, it’s become necessary to consider the skill problem compounded by McAvoy’s sudden absence.
Jokiharju, the 25-year-old Finn acquired at the March 7 trade deadline to plug the Brandon Carlo hole, was paired last season with Nikita Zadorov. In the ongoing zone-coverage, D-zone system, Jokiharju complemented Zadorov’s alpha-male game rather smartly, but amidst a fundamental change in how Boston’s defensemen play the game in their own end of the rink, Jokiharju’s stock is plummeting.
Over his last five outings, Jokiharju has twice played 20 minutes, and on both occasions McAvoy was out of the lineup. As his ice time has trended downward beginning with the Peeke-Hampus Lindholm pairing complementing the all-purpose, McAvoy-Zadorov pairing, things bottomed out on Saturday in Montreal when Jonathan Aspirot re-entered the lineup but not at Mason Lohrei’s expense. The Bruins have mostly liked what they’ve seen out of Lohrei since coming back from a string of healthy scratches that could have allowed him a conditioning stint in Providence without having to pass through waivers. Instead, Lohrei is back and – let’s be honest – properly protected from the matchups he faced when paired with McAvoy, triggering that disastrous stretch that landed him in the press box. Bottom line: Sturm preferred two left-handed shots on his third pairing in Montreal because he wanted to reward Lohrei and he needed Aspirot’s compete level and semi-roughhouse approach in that volatile arena.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mike Keenan has made his return to the NHL bench. Immensely successful but also polarizing at times, Keenan was famous for leveraging his GM into trades by elevating certain players and – let’s say – de-emphasizing others.
Sturm’s affinity for the aggressive Peeke and his apparently declining belief in Jokiharju constitutes an emerging challenge for Sweeney especially because of the utter lack of trade options for veteran, right-shot defensemen. Maybe he can identify a player on an equally desperate team during this road trip, one that might consider swapping problems on the basis of style points.
MacKenzie Weegar anyone? If the free-falling Flames are motivated, maybe there is a discussion to be had. Weegar has a long-term deal at $6.25 million AAV and a no-trade clause for the next three years inclusive (then modified), but if he and the team can be enticed, sometimes a change of scenery turns it around for the team and the player.
After the 2024-25 season, the Bruins were slow to re-sign Jokiharju, and the theory here is they were waiting on free agent Dante Fabbro, who would sign an 11th-hour extension to stay with Columbus, the team that acquired him at the trade deadline when Nashville went into selling mode. Fabbro was McAvoy’s teammate at Boston University, and we know Fabbro checks Sweeney’s boxes.
Meantime, the man system has not come easily to Jokiharju, whom Sweeney did sign (three years at $3 million per) under the duress of a fast-disappearing player pool on the eve of free agency. On the ice, Sturm likes players who don’t wait for the game to come to them. Since 2007, the Bruins’ defensive-zone strategy had been based on the defensemen literally waiting for the game to come to them. It was their job to protect patches of ice and the forwards’ job to close on and eliminate plays at the boards. Peeke fits into Sturm’s departure from the Julien-authored and Bruce Cassidy/Jim Montgomery/Joe Sacco-tweaked system and Jokiharju does not.
In one game this season, Jokiharju was picked off near the blue line while chasing a puck carrier in the man system. Players take their lives in their hands setting a pick on Zadorov. Peeke or Hampus Lindholm and it’s somewhere between those two extremes.
Calgary’s ask is for another, more-realistic time, but the Bruins find themselves with a player (Jokiharju) who no longer fits in. They’re committed to Sturm who, without McAvoy, has little choice but to play Jokiharju and hope for more, as he had with Johnny Beecher before the center/LW (also a late-first-round draft pick) was claimed off the waiver wire by Calgary and is in the Flames’ lineup tonight.
For many, that will trigger post-mortems on yet another first-round pick down the tubes for the Bruins. Sweeney knows the “fire…” chants will rain down from the balcony if the Bruins are able to get little out of this grueling trip and find themselves down multiple goals to the Rangers back home on Black Friday. He doesn’t begrudge those fans one ounce and puts more pressure on himself in synch with his team to make every decision with thorough research and intense thought.
Is there a chance that Jokiharju’s scratch in Montreal will motivate the player as in the recent cases of Lohrei and Casey Mittelstadt? In fairness, Mittelstadt’s return to the lineup was to LW in a positional swap with Pavel Zacha (the trade everyone seems to want to make except for the Bruins – and Zacha has proven why with his move to the middle). Now Mittelstadt is out of the lineup on Injured Reserve (with linemate Viktor Arvidsson), as the Bruins embark on a very difficult road trip that could theoretically see them play hard, play to their identity and, because they simply don’t have the horses right now, return home with one or two points.
Better to deal from a position of strength, but if we’re being honest the Bruins were temporarily in first place over the weekend but only points-wise. The logjam also known as the Atlantic Division at the same time had multiple teams outside the top eight but with better points percentages (points realized per number available) than the Bruins. Those two rankings could agree by the time the Bruins get home, and if so it won’t be pretty.
The gut feeling here is, especially as the Bruins get used to a show-me kind of old-school coach, they’ll realize that some old-school management fits in with the new direction, and that should mean a new right-shot defenseman.
Finally, apropos to none of the above, while it was nice to see Riley Tufte rewarded with the recall from Providence – Tufte spent the first few weeks of the season leading the AHL in scoring – what exactly is the point of putting No. 10 on the kid’s back? That number belongs in the TD Garden rafters, and it should have been up there four or five decades ago for Bill Cowley. Fernie Flaman, Jean Ratelle and Barry Pederson all did the number proudly, and several more have worn it since, but that is also the case with Rick Middleton’s No. 16, and that didn’t stop the Bruins from doing the right thing (while the Hockey Hall of Fame has whiffed on Nifty). Don’t be lazy, look up Cowley, and you’ll find a center who made more wings than Boeing. Not my saying, but it was someone’s for a reason.
Look him up and you’ll be compelled to mention him the next time anyone wants to talk about whose sweater should be retired next.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 