Boston Bruins
“I wish the hits would stop coming, honestly. It is tiring. My mouth, honestly, couldn’t feel worse.”
Charlie McAvoy scored the OT winner on Tuesday against the Kings. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
March 11, 2026 | 7:18 AM
3 minutes to read
Charlie McAvoy only had time to take two questions from the media after the Bruins’ 2-1 win over the Los Angeles Kings.
Despite serving as Boston’s hero in overtime on Tuesday, the Bruins defenseman had more pressing matters to attend to than reflect on his team’s 13th-straight victory at TD Garden.
“I have to go get more dental work,” McAvoy — his mouth bloodied and his shattered maw missing even more chiclets — said after Boston’s latest victory.
“I wish the hits would stop coming, honestly. It is tiring. My mouth, honestly, couldn’t feel worse,” he added postgame. “But I’ll get some work. We have a really good dentist here who is great. I am just really happy we got two points tonight.”
The 2025-26 season has seen McAvoy reach new heights on the frozen sheet. But at a grueling physical cost.
The 28-year-old blueliner is playing some of the best hockey of his career for Boston — keeping an upstart roster in a playoff spot with his seventh tally of the season on Tuesday night on Causeway Street.
He was a key cog on a Team USA squad that won Olympic gold for the first time in 46 years last month.
McAvoy has plenty to smile about this season. If only that were so easy.
“He’s not getting prettier, that’s for sure,” Bruins head coach Marco Sturm said after Tuesday’s win.
Fresh off a miserable 2024-25 season that included a season-ending shoulder injury and an infection that required a hospital stay, things haven’t gotten any easier for Boston’s top D-man this year.
His hopes of an injury-free campaign were snuffed out when he took a slapshot directly to the mouth in a road win over the Canadiens on Nov. 15 — fracturing his jaw, knocking out multiple teeth, and forcing doctors to insert a metal plate into the cracked joint.
He missed less than a month of game action while on the mend, despite losing 20 pounds in under two weeks while on a liquid-only diet.
Just before he took off for Italy to play in Milano-Cortina for Team USA, he avoided another catastrophic injury after taking a cheap shot from Florida’s Sandis Vilmanis on Feb. 4.
The hits have kept on coming since he shed the face shield he donned from December through February.
After taking another deflected puck to the face last week against the Nashville Predators, he was stapled (face-first) into the glass by Kings forward Samuel Helenius during the second period of Tuesday’s game — dislodging even more teeth.
McAvoy missed the remainder of the second period to assess the damage — but did return for both the third period and brief overtime period against Los Angeles.
Fittingly, it was McAvoy who secured two points for his team — taking a feed from David Pastrnak and beating Kings goalie Darcy Kuemper with a slick backhand attempt to clinch the 2-1 win.
“I thought he wouldn’t come back,” Sturm said of McAvoy. “For some reason, he has had a tough go this year. … Like, this kid just scored the game winner — he’s a competitor, and he knew he probably wasn’t at his best, but he played a very good third period and scored a beauty of a goal in overtime.”
In an ideal situation, McAvoy’s success this season wouldn’t need to give way to hours of misery spent undergoing repairs in a dentist’s chair.
But as the Bruins — now just one point behind Detroit for the top wild-card spot in the East — try to solidify their playoff positioning down the stretch, McAvoy’s toughness resonated with his head coach.
“Those are the guys you need in a locker room,” Sturm noted.
“The guy next to him, he’s going to look over [and ask] ‘OK, is he going to battle through it or not?’ If you sit across from him, and if you’re a young guy, to see that, you [say] ‘I don’t want to be the guy who’s going to quit,’” Boston’s bench boss added.
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
Get the latest Boston sports news
Receive updates on your favorite Boston teams, straight from our newsroom to your inbox.
