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By Conor Ryan
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COMMENTARY
A loss in October doesn’t unravel a team’s playoff hopes — not with 70-plus games left on the docket.
But after a miserable 2024-25 campaign where lopsided losses became a familiar sight, the 2025-26 Bruins paid homage to one of their ugliest seasons in history on Oct. 27 against the Ottawa Senators.
Fresh off a hard-fought win over the Avalanche that snapped a six-game losing streak, Marco Sturm’s club face-planted at Canadian Tire Centre — skating off the ice as the recipient of a 7-2 drubbing.
It was the type of result that might not have surprised some when gleaning at Boston’s 4-7-0 record. But through an uneven start to the season, Sturm’s club prided itself on clawing back into contests and not letting go of the rope when their fortunes flipped during a game.
Those silver linings — as hollow as they might have felt when Boston wasn’t stacking points in October — were nowhere to be found in Ottawa, where Boston coughed up four goals over the final 20 minutes of regulation and relinquished four power-play tallies across five opportunities.
For a first-year head coach in Sturm and the Bruins team trying to set the foundations in place amid an arduous retool, it was the type of setback that can sap a team’s resolve — and snowball into far more calamitous consequences.
“You gotta buy in or not,” Sturm said after the drubbing. “That’s right there. That’s the difference. If you look at Ottawa, they do it, and we’re not.”
What a difference 10 days can make.
Since that five-goal loss against Ottawa, the Bruins have not lost a game — with Thursday’s 3-2 overtime victory over that same Sens team marking the club’s fifth-straight victory.
“We talked about it before the game. We thought this team today was a different team than — whenever it was — 10 days ago,” Sean Kuraly said after Boston’s sixth victory in its last seven games. “Which is what you want to be if you want to continue to get better.
“And we knew we had to continue to get better. We did it out of necessity.”
Sturm and the Bruins will welcome two points in any capacity these days, with his roster finding new avenues to get back in the win column with each new game.
Marco delivered a message. pic.twitter.com/oMwdwhVlBV
PAV GETS US TWO POINTS ✌️ pic.twitter.com/PqzBzID8Vu
The Bruins’ recent resurgence has seen several players all pull on the rope.
After games where Boston’s offense has been propped up by youngsters like Khusnutdinov and Fraser Minten or a second line of Zacha, Casey Mittelstadt, and Viktor Arvidsson, the rest of Boston’s depth chart chipped in on Thursday.
Boston’s top goal scorer in Morgan Geekie lit the lamp once again, cleaning up a rebound off a shot hammered in by Andrew Peeke. Fourth-liner Sean Kuraly beat Linus Ullmark with a wrister from soft ice — the byproduct of Tanner Jeannot drawing skaters out of high-danger ice while holding onto the puck near the boards.
The triumphant return of the Kura-leap ⬆️ pic.twitter.com/GpHEEaVMbc
And in overtime, it was Boston’s big guns in McAvoy, David Pastrnak, and Zacha who delivered the final blow to keep the Bruins’ recent surge alive.
It’s a winning formula for the Bruins, but one that only becomes sustainable if Boston adheres to Sturm’s principles of stingy, grinding hockey that flips the margins in the Bruins’ favor, night in and night out.
After a rough start in their own end, the Bruins are starting to buy in.
“In Ottawa, it was the only game [they didn’t],” Sturm said of the Bruins adopting a tougher defensive mindset. “Other than that — these guys give me everything they have. They really do. Did we play the way we wanted early on? Probably not, but I think everyone gets it now.”
Be it Hampus Lindholm’s steadying presence in his return to Boston’s D corps, a revitalized McAvoy who is playing some of his best hockey with Nikita Zadorov as his partner, or Boston’s collective roster starting to learn the ropes of Sturm’s system, the end results are hard to ignore.
The Bruins’ are turning track meets into a swamp, especially through the neutral zone.
After relinquishing 12 high-danger scoring chances against Ottawa in 5-on-5 play on Oct. 27, Boston limited that same club to just four high-danger looks at 5-on-5 action on Thursday.
Since coughing up four power-play goals in their previous meeting against Ottawa, Boston’s penalty kill has gone 15-for-16 in shorthanded situations during this five-game winning streak — including a perfect 2-for-2 showing on Thursday.
“We’re doing enough right things to hang in games, and if you give yourself a chance — you’ve put yourself in a spot to get points, and that’s what this is all about,” Kuraly noted. “There’s still things we want to clean up, but we’re sticking to our system. I think we’re eliminating major mistakes that ended up in the back of our net during that losing streak, where I think it might have looked a little worse than it was.
“And then you just get down on yourself. And so now we’re just eliminating those major mistakes, and we kind of honed in on a couple areas of our defensive-zone structure, returning to our D zone and our neutral zone. I think it’s really helped us.”
The 2025-26 Bruins season has been anything but predictable so far for Sturm and his staff.
That six-game losing skid was a reminder of the growing pains that come with a team looking to build their identity and roster back up. A 7-2 setback served as a warning of what awaits if the Bruins’ buy-in on defense wanes over the slog of an 82-game season.
And on Thursday, yet another overtime win marked the latest example of a team that — through several trials and tribulations — is starting to believe.
“Everyone knows me now,” Sturm said. “Knows what I want out of them. Everyone is accepting their role. Everyone does their job. I can go on and on and again — that’s the way we have to play.”
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
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