Bruins name captains for 2025-26 season

The Bruins have been without a team captain since trading Brad Marchand to the Panthers at the 2025 trade deadline. And though the Bruins will remain without a player wearing the 'C' on their sweater for the start of the 2025-26 season, the Bruins did add a new leader to the mix, as the team officially announced Hampus Lindholm as their newest alternate captain.

Lindholm joins Charlie McAvoy and David Pastrnak as the other players wearing letters for the Bruins ahead of Wednesday's season-opening showdown with the Capitals down in Washington.

And it didn't appear to be much of a debate for Bruins head coach Marco Sturm, a player who wore an A for the Bruins during his time in Boston as a player, when it came to giving Lindholm the nod.

“[Lindholm] deserved it," Sturm said. "He stood out to me right away, starting with our first conversation I had with him on the phone when I got the job. He was into it, he cares, he wants to get better, and he wants to be the difference. I think, as a leader, he pretty much brings everything.” 

Boston's leadership group was something that's essentially been in flux since the retirements of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci in 2023, and has only been intensified with the in-season trades of Marchand, as well as Brandon Carlo and Charlie Coyle. Both Carlo and Coyle had been alternate captains at various points, even if for just a week or two, throughout their Bruins tenures.

The Bruins addressed what they viewed as a leadership void with character adds over the offseason, with Sean Kuraly brought back to Boston and Tanner Jeannot signed to a five-year contract. And there's also the belief that second-year Bruins such as Mark Kastelic and Nikita Zadorov will continue to grow and find their voices as leaders on and off the ice. Zadorov, for what it's worth, really seemed to embrace that gig at the end of the 2024-25 season.

But, of course, the most notable thing here is that the Bruins still do not have an official team captain. It feels like that may be the case for the entire season, too, and it's not something that the B's are overly focused on given everything else they need to address after their worst season since 2007.

"They're not concerned about the captaincy part of things," Bruins general manager Don Sweeney admitted earlier this week. "They're only concerned about the leadership and them coming together as a group."

This will be the first year that the Bruins begin their season without a team captain since the 2001-02 season.