The 2025-26 season has been a rollercoaster for Charlie McAvoy. The 28-year-old has been a pillar for the Boston Bruins and is putting together one of the best campaigns of his career, but it has also come with its fair share of bad luck. Despite that adversity, McAvoy has persevered and somehow found a way to be even better than he’s been in past seasons.
In general, this season hasn’t been the easiest for McAvoy.
The veteran defender missed nearly a month of action after taking a puck to the jaw against the Montreal Canadiens earlier in the season. He later appeared to re-aggravate the injury after taking a high hit from Sandis Vilmanis of the Florida Panthers at the start of February. As if that weren’t enough, another puck caught McAvoy up high on March 5, prompting him to tell reporters that he’ll need more dental work and that he wished the hits would stop coming.
Even with that string of bad injury luck, McAvoy is arguably putting together the best season of his NHL career.
McAvoy Stepping Up for the Bruins
With the Bruins trading off the majority of their core around the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, it was clear that the Bruins were closing the chapter on one era and ushering in a new one. Though most of the core faces would change, two mainstays that were kept to ultimately lead the new era for the Bruins would be David Pastrnak and McAvoy.
It would have been very easy for McAvoy and the Bruins to put together a disappointing 2025-26 campaign, just one season into a de facto retool. Instead, though, McAvoy has elevated his game to the next level this season. Averaging 24:19 of ice time this season, McAvoy has put together a season that should end with him setting a new career-high in points when all is said and done.
McAvoy may have missed 12 games this season, but he’s putting together the best per-game marks in his career in goals, assists and points. With nine goals and 49 points in 54 games, McAvoy could ultimately beat his prior best totals in goals (12), assists (46), and points (56) should he find a way to remain healthy for the rest of the season. In the end, McAvoy’s priorities will always be for the Bruins to win games and ultimately hoist the Stanley Cup one day, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate the personal victories along the way. This is especially true when the personal milestones and victories help the cause of the Bruins winning games.
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McAvoy has been one of the NHL’s elite defenders since joining the Bruins during the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs, but his offensive output has never been a focal point of his game. This season, he’s found another gear when the team has needed it most. Drafted to ideally become a top-pairing defender for the Bruins, McAvoy not only met those expectations early on, he’s far exceeded them as a cornerstone piece for the Bruins. The most exciting part for the team is that he’s seemingly only getting better.
The Bruins are right in the thick of things in the Eastern Conference playoff race. At the time of this writing, they occupy the first Wild Card spot in the Eastern Conference and are just two points behind the Montreal Canadiens for third place in the Atlantic Division. The Bruins will take on the Canadiens in the second game of a back-to-back stretch of road games on Tuesday after taking on the New Jersey Devils on Monday. Every single game has major ramifications this time of year, but the game against the Canadiens could prove to be the biggest game of the season thus far.
