BOSTON –– Marco Sturm sat in front of the media at TD Garden on Wednesday and quickly summarized how he feels about the 2026-27 season.
“I am pumped,” the head coach said.
The Boston Bruins’ training camp has its first on-ice session on Thursday at Warrior Ice Arena, and before the action gets started, Sturm and general manager Don Sweeney previewed the upcoming year.
With the new Collective Bargaining Agreement in effect, training camp will be shortened to have four games, and the regular season will expand to 84 games. That means the B’s and all other NHL clubs will have around a week less of preparation ahead of opening night. Sturm is prepared to adapt on the fly.
“It’s actually going to be interesting to see how it’s going to work out. We all have something in mind that we would like to do. I don’t know if it’s going to happen that way,” Sturm said. “It is going to be a little bit challenging, too, having the last two games as a back-to-back on the road. So there’s a lot of things we have to see, and also we have to figure out through camp.”
Sweeney echoed the same sentiment and added that all the Bruins are healthy and will be on the ice.
“Typically, depending on when you open, the players would like to play in the last game, or Marco would like to see them in the last game and work backwards from there,” Sweeney said. “We will work through the roster side of things and maximize every opportunity we can to evaluate, and more importantly, get guys ready to go.”
Here are three other main points from Wednesday’s press conference:
The Captaincy Question
Sweeney did not mince words about the state of the Bruins’ leadership group.
“We are going to announce a captain this year,” he said. “We will do that before opening night. So nobody has to ask who it is or whatnot. We’ve spent a lot of time; we understand the legacy of our organization and we want to do it the right way. We’ve made it perfectly clear that we’ll be announcing that before the season starts.”
Charlie McAvoy, David Pastrnak and Hampus Lindholm were the team’s three alternate captains during the 2025-26 season – Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov occasionally wore the ‘A,’ too. Leading by committee has always been a core piece of the Bruins’ identity, and that won’t change, even with a designated captain.
“We took our time. We allowed the leadership group last year – we know who is at the forefront of that leadership group,” Sweeney said. “We’ve been talking about this for a while. We know exactly what we are going to do. But last year was a good example of allowing players who are going to be required in that leadership role to organically step forward. We are in a good place.”
