Bruins Need To Alleviate Costly Common Theme Amid Struggles

The Boston Bruins have struggled to find any type of consistency so far in the 2024-25 campaign.

The only thing the Bruins have been consistent with is the amount of penalties they’ve taken through the first eight games of the season. Boston has committed a staggering 44 minor penalties.

“We got to stop taking penalties,” Charlie McAvoy told reporters after the Bruins third straight loss on Thursday night, per team-provided audio. “And that’s myself included. I didn’t get one tonight, but sometimes it’s bad luck with stick infractions. Most of the time you can always draw it back to effort.”

McAvoy continued: “We’re taxing our penalty kill way too much. We have a great penalty kill. We have a great penalty kill coach (associate coach Joe Sacco). Right now, we’re just not doing the job. We got to stay out the box, and when we do (get a penalty), we got to kill it.”

Nikita Zadorov leads the Bruins with nine infractions, followed by David Pastrnak (7) and Brad Marchand and Charlie McAvoy, who each have six.

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Despite an overall record of 3-4-1 to start the season, McAvoy said the Bruins are not panicking.

“We’re in the process right now in this first 10 games here,” McAvoy said. “We’re trying to find out how we’re going to be our best. We don’t like these results. We’re acknowledging that. It’s different from what we’ve had in the past where we’ve come out running and gunning. I think we’re all right. We’re not panicking here. We know we need to play better.”

McAvoy added: “We’re fine. We’re not going to panic. It’s game eight. I think it’s a little bit of our own doing. We’re not taking care of pucks at the right time and obviously taking too many penalties. So there’s definitely areas we can clean up. … We’ve got to get back to playing the right way for 60 minutes, and doing the right things all the time and understanding that success is hard and we need to play a hard game to win. That’s how we’ve always won, and we just need to get back to that.”