Charlie McAvoy and the Boston Bruins’ messy exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs on Friday night reminds Rink Rap of the Bruins’ 1982, Game 7 loss to the Quebec Nordiques on home ice, where an injured Raymond Bourque was not available and when, with two ticks left in a 2-1 game Quebec was about to win, Terry O’Reilly took a swipe at referee Andy Van Hellemond. But it’s the state of the two hockey teams that was also similar to what we just witnessed at TD Garden.
1981-82: The Bruins had just come through the other side of their 1980-81 splat (a three-game sweep at the hands of the upstart Minnesota North Stars). The Lunch Pail gang was aging out, but Bourque and Brad McCrimmon joined the Bruins in 1979, Steve Kasper and Keith Crowder in 1980, Barry Pederson, Norman Leveille, Tom Fergus and Bruce Crowder in 1981, and Mike Krushelnyski by the end of the 1981-82 season (Pete Peeters would join the Bruins in the McCrimmon trade, and Gord Kluzak made their 82-83 team at age 18). In 1983, Peeters became the only Boston goalie to win the Vezina in the expansion era prior to Tim Thomas in 2009 and ’11 (and later Tuukka Rask and Linus Ullmark – Jeremy Swayman is a 2025-26 finalist).
The 1981-82 Bruins excited their fans with an emerging, young Bruins core led by Rick Middleton in his magical prime, while Brad Park, O’Reilly, captain Wayne Cashman and Don Marcotte were still viable leaders while showing the many miles of their great NHL careers. The Nordiques’ younger core had been together longer with the Stastny brothers (Peter, Anton and Marian) and Michel Goulet and were coming of age. And goaltender Dan Bouchard, left unprotected by the Bruins in the 1972 expansion draft, was motivated as he took the nets for Game 7 against the team that let him go to Atlanta in the ’72 NHL expansion. Quebec won the series in seven after Peter McNab’s overtime goal won Game 6 at le Colisee.
Point is the best was yet to come for those young Bruins, as it is now. Only now it’s more difficult to see it along an uncertain horizon with most of the Bruins’ prospects playing college hockey.
2025-26: The Bruins are out the other side of their 2024-25 freefall, but still needing significant work to restore Cup contention, something they hope to accomplish while David Pastrnak’s still got game. In the case of Friday night’s Game 6 at TD Garden, a chunk of the faithful had already headed down the stairs and were out in the Hub plaza when McAvoy lost his composure and swung his stick at Zach Benson’s arm. McAvoy has been invited to an in-person hearing with the NHL’s Department of Player Safety to take his medicine (see below). That situation will impact the start of the 2026-27 season, just as O’Reilly was suspended the first 10 games of the 1982-83 season for striking Van Hellemond with two seconds left in his 81-82 season.
Regarding McAvoy vs. Benson: McAvoy, in his in-person hearing with the DOPS, will probably assert he was slew-footed with intent to injure in a high-speed situation and at a dangerous distance from the boards. Nonetheless, there is no defense for his chase and chop. The NHL will answer, even so, you can’t do that, and will probably suspend him six games to start the 2026-27 season.
Don’t be surprised if the 2026-27 schedule matches up Bruins-Sabres for an October home-and-home, not to see each other until at least January after McAvoy has had ample opportunity to get upset about a dozen other in-season incidents and associated opponents.
Right now rage is running hot in Bruins Nation, especially without an opportunity to answer. The parting shot(s) delivered by Ridly Greig to a tied-up David Pastrnak in the final minute of the final meeting this season between the Bruins and the Ottawa Senators was punctuated by Greig running to the visitors bench after bloodying Pasta and giving him the schoolyard “nah-nah” with a finger in each ear. Greig’s antics have since landed him in hotter water with the Carolina Hurricanes after becoming third-man-in via a sucker punch on Sean Walker. Captain Brady Tkachuk is going to have to sit that kid down and teach him some manners before he embroils his teammates in some bad situations.
So guess whose faces the NHL’s finger will wagger? You guessed it, the Carolina Hurricanes’ and the Boston Bruins’ faces, that whose.
The league says it wants to get dirty plays (and players) out of hockey, but what the league consistently proves is that it will only punish frontier justice. Victims are lectured, not perpetrators, not in hockey. The NHL’s main concern is that it loses control of its own game, like in the bench-clearing brawls of the 1980s – you can find them on YouTube. Commissioner Gary Bettman debated the merits of fighting in hockey with the great Don Cherry when Bettman was first appointed in the 1990s, but what he has settled for is fighting in a much more controlled environment. These days, the NHL ironically seeks to prevent the organic hockey fight, the one where two angry players “wanna go” as former WHA/NHL pugilist-turned-referee Paul Stewart liked to say and even titled his book “Ya Wanna Go?” Now, NHL fights are confined to two, agreeable tough guys dropping the gloves with the drop of the puck upon a faceoff, especially if it’s in response to a dirty hit in a prior game (the NHL will support informal acts of closure). Spontaneous fighting, however, is unofficially out of hockey thanks to directives from the league to its on-ice officials, as in these are the fights that take the game out of the league’s control so don’t let them happen.
Which brings us to the strange juxtaposition that the legendary Jon Cooper is a finalist for the Jack Adams award as NHL Coach of the Year in a season that began with preseason bloodbath after preseason bloodbath between his Tampa Bay Lightning and the two-time defending, Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, who had once again taken the Lightning’s lunch money the previous spring.
Their 2025 encounter was a playoff series so routine and uncontested that Tampa Bay had to conduct some serious, summer soul searching. They had once been the Panthers’ daddy but no more, and for three years running it was the other way around. The 2025-26 preseason was Tampa’s resolution. And, most notably, the Lightning didn’t let it go at one statement. They kept doing it, making the league gulp at the unrelenting ferocity with which the Bolts approached the Panthers last fall.
It would have been a hell of a year to get another intrastate playoff series, but after playing the longest season three straight years, the Panthers had nothing for this campaign, especially once Sasha Barkov was removed from the epicenter of their Cup-contention equation with an ACL sprain in training camp. It was over before it started, but I digress.
The NHL could have brought every branch of the military, and the Lightning weren’t budging. They went at the Panthers in a manner that Boston fans learned several years ago to stop wishing the Bruins ever would with anybody since Philadelphia in 1977 and ’78.
So don’t let your rage simmer, nor lust for revenge. It’s not in the cards. A realistic goal is to play the game overall in a manner that makes other teams hate you, and of course you need the right players to accomplish that. It was suggested to me on social media that Jeffrey Viel was redundant, and that’s why he was traded to Anaheim. Fair statement, but even so it’s been hard to watch Viel and not feel like the Bruins made a mistake while their own team couldn’t get to Alex Lyon with any consistency beyond Tanner Jeannot and Mark Kastelic.
Even though these Bruins – McAvoy, Kastelic, Jeannot and Nikita Zadorov – are certifiably dangerous when angry, and even though this 2025-26 brand of Bruins hockey is more like the Zdeno Chara, Johnny Boychuk, Adam McQuaid, Shawn Thornton brand of 2009-13 than, say, the 2017-23 versions, it’s not likely the Bruins are going to go vigilante on Greig, Benson or anyone else whom a 1991 Cam Neely would have classified during his Hall of Fame playing days as “a gutless puke.”
Claude Lemieux and Ulf Samuelsson, your legacy is safe.
I know it’s the broadcasters who get the Adams vote, but it’s hard not to ignore, in this season of all seasons, Cooper’s presence among the three finalists, and especially in a season of Marco Sturm and Rick Tocchet. The Lightning didn’t even win the Atlantic Division, Buffalo did.
Rink Rap realizes Cooper has never won the award and that this, for the most part, has been a pushback season for Tampa Bay. I just find it unavoidable the memory of how this pushback began.
The Bruins are forming their identity, and while they will not be extended the same respect that the Lightning get as an established, Cup-contending core of players and a widely esteemed coach, there is much to learn as they tweak in the next few seasons while, at the same time, looking to incrementally upgrade their speed and skill on the forward lines.
The Bruins met with the media Sunday morning at Warrior, where it was learned Zadorov was playing with a torn medial-collateral knee ligament, and Viktor Arvidsson was trying to play despite a punctured lung and torn rib cartilage (that’s 2013 Patrice Bergeron and 2004 Joe Thornton rolled all into one world of pain). Hampus Lindholm was skating on a broken foot since early in the season. It would seem that surgeries are being avoided this time around.
With CEO Charlie Jacobs, president Cam Neely and GM Don Sweeney scheduled to meet the media on Wednesday afternoon, a soon-to-come Rink Rap will take a look at where the Bruins are at by positional groups.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 