Could the Boston Bruins actually go another full NHL regular season without formally naming a captain?
Bruins President Cam Neely raised that possibility while speaking about the team this week after it had been assumed it would be a fait accompli that either Charlie McAvoy or David Pastrnak would be named captain ahead of this season. McAvoy, of course, will be serving out a six-game suspension to start the season after his stick-swinging incident with Zach Benson in the final moments of last spring’s B’s/Sabres first-round playoff series.
And Pastrnak spent the waning part of last season admitting that time feels like it’s beginning to run short for him as a player as he turns 30 years old, and the desire to win sooner rather than later is a burgeoning reality for the game-breaking right winger.
“I don’t know if you necessarily need to have a guy unless there is that one guy that really stands out,” said Neely while discussing the Bruins during this week’s WEEI/NESN Jimmy Fund Radio Telethon. “We’ve been blessed to have great captains here. From [Ray] Bourque, [Zdeno] Chara, [Patrice] Bergeron. We like leaders, not followers. So you can hopefully have 20 leaders. That’s the one thing that we look at: who is going to help lead the team? Maybe it’s more of a tradition in hockey where you have a letter on your sweater. Don [Sweeney], Marco, and I are going to sit down shortly to talk about that.”
It’s a point well-taken that the Bruins are looking for a dressing room full of leaders, as that’s customarily what it takes to be the winning hockey team hoisting the Cup at the end of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But it’s also interesting, and perhaps a reflection of where the Bruins are in their remolding stage, that they’re holding back slightly in naming a captain given how strong the leadership tradition was from Chara to Bergeron to Brad Marchand over the last 20-plus years.
Interestingly enough, Marco Sturm seemed to think that not having a captain last season added to the overall team ownership that the players collaborated to build last season, and that veterans like Nikita Zadorov, Hampus Lindholm, Sean Kuraly and Morgan Geekie made it a stronger overall leadership group for the Black and Gold.
“I always said I wanted a captain,” Sturm said. “But now, being through it the first time [with] me as a head coach and not having a captain, I thought it went really well. Just maybe because guys were really close, the leadership group.
“I thought they did a good job overall. Everyone had their input. There were no outsiders. We always kept it really tight. So I actually didn’t mind it. But having said that, there will be more conversations to have with Don [Sweeney] on how we are going to move forward. But personally, I liked how we handled it — especially the players and how they handle the situation all year long.”
The obvious leader in the clubhouse to be the next captain of the Bruins is Pastrnak, who continues his transformation from goal-scoring sniper to playmaking force of hockey nature with last season marking his fourth straight 100-point campaign. He is the unquestioned leader in the B’s dressing room as their highest-impact player, and that could be seen when he was challenging his Bruins teammates between periods during the playoff series against the Sabres at the lowest moments in the series.
David Pastrnak lighting into his team after the 1st period in Game 4 against the Sabres. There’s a lot more that goes into being a team captain than yelling at the room when they need to hear it, but this and the Game 5 response in Buffalo was good to see pic.twitter.com/wIXw5v7e4Z
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) May 8, 2026
But even the 30-year-old right wing admitted at the end of last season that going through an NHL season without a captain was actually a positive thing for last season’s group of players greater than the sum of their parts.
“It was a full group effort,” said Pastrnak. “Everybody helped us. There are so many leaders. And during the year, the season is so long. So early on, you lean more on certain guys, the older guys and the more experienced guys. But as the season goes and you’ve been together for a while, there are a lot of guys [who] are a younger age and middle-aged stepping up as a leader.”
Pastrnak’s leadership style is certainly different from that of players like Chara and Bergeron that he learned from as a younger player, and Sturm interestingly likened it to Alex Ovechkin during his brief playing days with the Capitals. But another possibility with waiting on naming a captain is that the B’s are holding out for another established veteran player, somewhere down the line, entering the fray with captain credentials.
Things remain decidedly unresolved in Detroit with Dylan Larkin after he demanded a trade at the beginning of this offseason, but will need to expand his trade destinations beyond Florida, Vegas and Minnesota if the Red Wings were going to find a suitable trading partner for their captain. Or he may start the season in Detroit, but it remains to be seen if things will bubble up again with Larkin clearly wanting to get himself to a winning situation.
REPORT: The expectation is Dylan Larkin will attend camp and play for the Red Wings this season, per @asktheduffer
— 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔇𝔢𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔦𝔱 𝔗𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 📰 (@the_det_times) August 17, 2026
Management hopes that the removal of Steve Yzerman will help ease tensions. pic.twitter.com/vMmtXKZbkf
Or Columbus captain Zach Werenski is another player who might be moved at some point in the near future after there was clear weariness with the perpetually rebuilding Blue Jackets, but that feels like it will develop later, as both the team and the player have smoothed things out at least temporarily.
Those kinds of situations make it a theoretical scenario that the Bruins might keep their captaincy vacant until they can bring in a player they feel fully embodies what they’re looking for in a captain as the right player at the right time in their career.
The bottom line is that the captaincy for the Bruins might not be as cut-and-dried as everybody thought at the end of last season, and it could very well be an interesting side storyline to training camp along with the others for the Black and Gold.