The injury bug is starting to severely sting the Boston Bruins

Boston Bruins

“We miss our guys that aren’t here. Let’s be upfront about that.”

Marco Sturm wasn’t looking for excuses on Monday morning. 

In a game as bruising as hockey, injuries are all but inevitable — especially amid a packed schedule exacerbated by an extended winter break for the Olympics. 

So, ahead of a game where an already thin Bruins depth chart was set to roll out four players who opened the year in Providence, Boston’s head coach shrugged off his team’s injury woes as the price that comes with playing in the NHL.

“Unfortunately, a lot of good players are out,” Sturm said after morning skate wrapped at Warrior Ice Arena, adding: “It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take all of [our] forwards.

“We’ve got to take care out of our D. Special teams — we’ve got to be better. Stay out of the box. We just have to find ways to go through stretches like that.”

Hours later, the Bruins’ dressing room at TD Garden echoed a similar message. 

There would be no silver linings or mulligans drawn from Boston’s 3-1 loss to the Hurricanes on Monday night — as dour as the state of Boston’s roster might be these days.

“I don’t think that’s any excuse at all,” Hampus Lindholm said of Boston’s injury issues as of late. “We’ve still gotta play to our identity. That’s what’s been making us successful so far this year. We don’t want to get too high, too low here. I think we’ve been playing some good hockey, and tonight was something we can learn from and move forward.”

The Bruins have displayed a knack for overcoming adversity this season, be it putting extended losing skids in the rearview mirror or having players further down the lineup pull on the rope when a key cog or two is out of sorts. 

The issue for the Bruins these days is that just about every segment of the Bruins’ lineup is currently sputtering after an extended string of poor luck on the injury front. 

On Monday, the Bruins took to the ice without their top defenseman in Charlie McAvoy — whose status moving forward remains up in the air after taking a slap shot to the mouth during Saturday’s win against Montreal. 

Monday’s bout with the Hurricanes marked the eighth-straight game that the Bruins have played without their top-line center in Elias Lindholm, who has been hindered since colliding knee-on-knee with Buffalo’s Jordan Greenway on Oct. 30. 

Boston’s overachieving offensive output has been bolstered by the playmaking punch provided by a second line of Pavel Zacha, Casey Mittelstadt, and Viktor Arvidsson. Against Carolina, only Zacha remained in the lineup — centering a pair of wingers in Alex Steeves and Matej Blumel with just four combined goals scored in the NHL ranks.

Mittelstadt and Arvidsson, meanwhile, were placed on injured reserve Monday morning — meaning more tough sledding could be ahead for Zacha and his reworked grouping. 

Given how much talent that has been sapped from Boston’s roster over the last few weeks, Monday’s result shouldn’t have necessarily come as a surprise — especially against a stingy defensive team like Carolina. 

Despite entering Monday night ranked fifth in the NHL in goals scored per game (3.35), the Bruins’ offensive arsenal looked more akin to a squirt gun against the Hurricanes’ layered defense and active sticks.

By the end of the night, Boston generated just three high-danger scoring chances at 5-on-5 play against Carolina, while the Hurricanes put forth 13 against Jeremy Swayman (29 saves). 

A sixth-ranked Bruins power play didn’t cash in on their first three bids against a pressure-heavy Carolina PK — with Boston’s lone tally coming on the man advantage courtesy of Riley Tufte with just 9.6 seconds left in regulation. 

On a night where Boston’s power play was largely out of sorts and the team’s top offensive conduits in David Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie were quiet in the offensive zone, any hope of another scoring salvo for Sturm’s team were snuffed out. 

“A game like today — I feel like some other guys have to step up too,” Strum said. “You can’t always look at number 88 [Pastrnak], 91 [Nikita Zadorov], 27 [Hampus Lindholm] … You need other guys to step up, as well. And I think that that was a little bit missing today.”

The road doesn’t get any easier for the Bruins, who now have to fly out to the West Coast and take on a red-hot Ducks team on Wednesday night. There stands a chance that Elias Lindholm could rejoin Boston at some point on its four-game road trip — a welcome sight after Boston’s top line was knocked for two 5-on-5 goals against on Monday. 

But it remains to be seen when other key cogs like McAvoy, Mittelstadt, and Arvidsson will rejoin a Bruins team that has exceeded expectations so far this fall, but run the risk of letting those positives slip away if this shorthanded squad can’t right the ship. 

“Again, we miss our guys that aren’t here,” Swayman said. “Let’s be upfront about that. But that’s an opportunity for guys that are all NHL capable, and again, we’re confident going into this road trip knowing that everyone wearing the black and gold is going to give us a chance to win every night.”

 

Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.