Bruins Must Avoid Another Winless Western Road Trip

The Anaheim Ducks, after floundering at the bottom of the standings for the past several seasons, have bounced back with a vengeance in 2025-26. They’re currently second in the Pacific Division with an 11 – 6 – 1 record, and already beat the Bruins when they came East in October, 7 – 5. The last matchup saw Mikael Granlund score a career-high five-points, and Nikita Nesterenko had four-points.  

The Ducks are a young and exciting team that has started the season strong. Leo Carlsson just became the youngest player to hit 100 career points in the franchise’s history, and he’s done a lot to push the team forward. He’ll be a tough assignment for the Bruins’ defense to contain, while Cutter Gauthier and the always dangerous Troy Terry will be other guys to keep an eye on.

After playing in Anaheim, the Bruins will pop over to Los Angeles to face the Kings, who are currently sitting in first place in the Pacific. Their captain, Anze Kopitar, is playing his final NHL season in 2025-26, and it has clearly lit a fire under the team to be competitive in the longtime player’s final season. They soundly beat Boston last March when the team was last in LA, 7 – 2. Luckily for the Bruins, they are a much better team now than they were at the end of last season. 

They’ll finish out the California road trip against the San Jose Sharks. While they may have the worst record of the three teams at 8 – 8 – 3, they are a team on the rise in the last few weeks, recently going on a four-game win streak with victories against the Seattle Kraken, Winnipeg Jets, Florida Panthers, and Minnesota Wild. Macklin Celebrini is currently third in points amongst NHL skaters, trailing only Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid. This game, coming at the end of the road trip, could sneakily be the toughest one of the three.

Bruins Can’t Go Winless in West Again

The Bruins’ western road trip last month was a complete momentum stopper for the team early in the season. Scoring dried up from the top-six outside of David Pastrnak, and they went from only allowing five goals during their first three games of the season, to giving up 13 during their three-game, winless road trip. The defense completely broke down, and it carried into their next two games after they got back home to Boston. 

It’s very tight in the Atlantic right now with only eight points separating first and last place. Another winless road trip out west could easily send the Bruins toppling down the standings. 

Most importantly though, is the timing of this trip. When they leave California, the Bruins will be 24 games into the season, a quarter of the way done with American Thanksgiving just days away. It’s the time to start evaluating and questioning just who this team is and realistically, what is their ceiling in 2025-26. This is a fun team to watch again, and one that is capable of going toe to toe with some of the best in the league. But they could also be a streaky team. So far this season, they started with a three-game win streak, then immediately lost six-in-a-row. They then had a seven-game win streak that came to an end this past week. Turning around now and going on another long losing streak would say a lot about who this team is, and it wouldn’t be good things.

The trade deadline may be several months away, but American Thanksgiving is the time to start posing the tough questions. Is this a team that should be prepping to be buyers at the deadline, to bring in another defenseman or center, and try to make a real run in the postseason? Or, should they stand pat and let what happens happen, which would most likely be a season of making it back to the playoffs but probably not going particularly far. Or, if they lose all their California games and continue to play this streaky brand of hockey, do they become sellers again, albeit, probably more moderately than what they did last season? 

One, three-game swing through California won’t make or break the season, but it can certainly reveal a lot and could be something looked back at as a turning point when evaluating the team at the end of the 2025-26 season. Losing is never great, but another winless western road trip at this particular moment in the season would be particularly bad.

Bruins Can Win Tough Games

The Bruins have shown that they can face off against tough opponents in the past few weeks, so while they will be facing off against three challenging teams in California this week, there is no reason to believe the team can’t pull off at least one victory. They just beat the Canadians, who were first place in the Atlantic. They’ve defeated the Avalanche a few weeks ago, who are arguably the best team in the league right now. 

After a disastrous 2024-25 season, the Bruins are putting something together in 2025-26. What that is exactly still remains to be seen, but this is at least a much better team than many people thought coming into the season.