I met Jesper Boqvist for the first time before the season at the Boston Bruins’ annual golf outing at the Pine Hills in Plymouth, Mass. He was tagging along with a much larger man named Hampus Lindholm. Had Hampus told me Boqvist was his teenage brother, I would have believed him.
This kid is going to play for the Bruins (I thought)? Six months later, Boqvist is playing his heart out to the point that Coach Jim Montgomery has designated him the center who will bring out the best in Jake DeBrusk.
It’ll be speed with speed on the third line.
Did you have Boqvist in your playoff top nine? Did you even have him wearing the “B” and not the “P” on his game sweater?
Both are fair questions, especially given how the 2023-24 season of centennial celebrations began, who made the NHL team, what the lines looked like, and the fact that the Boston Bruins roared to U.S. Thanksgiving at 14-1-3.
Their third and fourth lines for the Black Friday loss to Detroit: Matt Poitras between DeBrusk and Morgan Geekie, and Johnny Beecher between Jakub Lauko and Patrick Brown.
Not counting Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark, who evenly split the goaltending down the middle at 9 games each, any core players who did not appear in all 18 games were injured. Debrusk played 17 games, Charlie McAvoy and Derek Forbort 14 and Matt Grzelcyk 8.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Poitras and James van Riemsdyk are the only other Bruins to play in all 18 games before Thanksgiving. Kevin Shattenkirk played 15 of the first 18. Geekie played in 12, Lauko in 11, Danton Heinen and Oskar Steen in 10 each, Mason Lohrei in 9, Ian Mitchell in 8, Brown in 7, and Parker Wotherspoon in 6.
Boqvist played one of those games, skating 6:01 on Oct. 26.
Now he’s a top-niner, but he remembers quite well how it started so he’s not taking a selfie in the mirror to celebrate how it’s going.