Pastrnak gets the C, and Boston finally stops the group project

Look, it took the Bruins 18 months to name a captain. I've seen faster decisions from six guys ordering for the whole crew at the Dunkin' drive-thru.

But they got it right. David Pastrnak is the 28th captain in team history, and the answer was sitting in the room the whole time. Grade: A-minus. The minus is for the 18 months.

The résumé is simple: he's 30, he's starting his 13th season, and all 833 of his NHL games have come in a Bruins sweater. He has 420 goals, fifth in franchise history, and 933 points, sixth all-time.

Last season he had 29 goals and a career-high 71 assists for his fourth straight 100-point year. Seventy-one assists, from a guy who used to treat passing like a rumor he'd heard once at a cousin's wedding reception.

That's the part that sold me, because with no legitimate No. 1 center available, he stopped chasing 40 goals and started feeding people, and Boston still made the playoffs. Nobody should get a letter for a highlight reel, and he didn't; he got it for changing his game when the organization needed him to.

Now the Florida bit, because somebody has to say it. The last guy to wear the C in Boston was Brad Marchand, who got traded down here in March 2025 and promptly won a Cup in Sunrise. I still need to sit down for that sentence.

After that, the Bruins went a full season with no captain for the first time since 2001-02. They ran it by committee: Pastrnak, Charlie McAvoy, Hampus Lindholm, Nikita Zadorov and Elias Lindholm. Five guys sharing one job isn't a leadership group, it's a group project, and we all know who did the work.

McAvoy was the other name in the conversation, and he took the high road. "Whatever happens, it's out of my hands, but I don't think there would be any friction," he said. Buddy, the friction moved to Florida.

Coach Marco Sturm compared Pastrnak's style to Alex Ovechkin's rather than Patrice Bergeron's or Zdeno Chara's. "His brain is already ahead of most others," Sturm said. "He has that gift; he's born with it."

That's the right comparison, and the Bergeron one is the trap. Bergeron was a monk with a faceoff dot. Chara was a lighthouse in skates. Pastrnak is the guy who keeps the room loose and then drops 100 points on your head. Stop asking him to be either of the first two, because he's something different entirely, and it works.

He's also only the second European-born captain in team history, after Chara. That's the Bruins tax on this one: in Boston the C comes with 27 guys' worth of homework, and he just got handed the whole binder.

Pastrnak said he's "very grateful and humbled and honored to be the captain." Good, because the first order of business is obvious. On Thursday the Flyers shut Boston out 2-0 in a game best remembered for Trevor Zegras getting penalized for tucking in his shirt. Yes, it's preseason. I'm still writing it down.

Buddy, I'm begging you, score a goal before the other team's wardrobe becomes the headline again.

I said what I said.