Healthy at Last: Elias Lindholm Finds His Game in Boston
Two seasons of a bad back, two trips off the ice and a lost spring. This time, he says, his body feels good.
The Bruins were one loss away from their worst skid of the season. Down two goals to the 31st-ranked Blackhawks with seven minutes left on Halloween, they scratched their way back to force overtime. Then Elias Lindholm ended it, and turned to celebrate with Fraser Minten.
It was a small moment in a messy 5-4 win. For Lindholm, it meant more. He has spent most of two years in Boston playing hurt, getting hurt, or answering for why he isn't Patrice Bergeron. Now, centering a third line with Casey Mittelstadt and rookie James Hagens, he's one of the reasons a 10-4-1 team sits first in the Atlantic. And for the first time since he signed, his back isn't the story.
It has been the story for a long time. Boston signed him in the summer of 2024 to a seven-year deal at $7.75 million a season, with the job of helping fill the hole Bergeron left. Before he played a game for the Bruins, his back gave out. The injury came in August 2024 and left him playing catch-up through most of his first training camp. He played every game that season anyway, but the production looked thin next to the contract, and it wasn't until the end of last season that he revealed his back had been bothering him since before that first year began.
Year two opened the way Boston hoped, with Lindholm off to a quick start centering the top line next to David Pastrnak. Then came Oct. 30 against Buffalo. He collided with Jordan Greenway and had to be helped off the ice. The team called it a lower-body injury and never said more. Ten games later he was back, returning against San Jose on Nov. 23, and coach Marco Sturm planned to put him right back on the first power-play unit.
The winter that followed was a strong one. By late January he had 37 points in 44 games and a spot on Sweden's Olympic roster. Then, on Jan. 27 against Nashville, he appeared to get hurt taking a faceoff in the second period, the Boston Globe reported, and he didn't finish the night. The team listed it as an upper-body injury. He sat out the last three games before the Olympic break.
His back had started acting up again too. He tweaked it in the middle of the season, and a long bus ride home from New York in bad weather made it worse. So before he left for Milan, he took a pain-killing injection. He played three games for Sweden, which finished seventh. After the break he managed just 11 points in 25 games. A season that had looked like a breakthrough ended with 13 games missed and the same old questions.
The answer, this time, started in the gym. Lindholm reworked his summer around rehab, cut back on heavy weights and took longer before ramping up on the ice. Rehab, he told Boston.com in September, had been "the main thing the whole summer," and the lesson he took from it was patience.
“I think once you have a little, you know, feel something, you take a step back and make sure you feel good for the next day.”
– Elias Lindholm, to Boston.com, September 2026
He didn't pretend the problem was solved. Asked whether the back trouble was behind him, he said only, "Yeah, hopefully. I think it's kind of hard to know right now."
The other change came from his coach. Lindholm opened the season on the top line with Pastrnak and JJ Peterka, but the trio struggled at even strength as Boston split its first four games. After the Oct. 5 win over Ottawa, Sturm moved Pavel Zacha up beside Pastrnak and slid Lindholm down to center Mittelstadt and Hagens, keeping him on the top power-play unit.
On paper, it looked like a demotion. In practice, it gave him room to breathe. He's playing the lightest minutes of his Boston tenure and doing more with them, winning faceoffs at a better rate than in either of his first two seasons here. His 12 points in 15 games trail only Pastrnak on the team. More telling than any number, though, is how he talks. After a game in Anaheim on Oct. 16, he sounded almost relieved.
“I think it's the first time in a long time [where] my body feels good. For quite some time it's been always something, I feel like. So my body feels great.”
– Elias Lindholm, via Boston Hockey Now
Sturm says he saw this version of Lindholm all along. "There's always been, I feel like, a target on his back since he signed here... maybe because of money," he said in October. "I always saw him a little different. More like he's doing right now. Not about points, just playing the right way. And when you need him, he's there."
On Halloween, the Bruins needed him, and he was there. 98.5 The Sports Hub named him its first star and wrote that he is "playing the best hockey of his Bruins career right now."
Still, fifteen games is a small sample, and a good start has turned on him before. A year ago, October ended on injured reserve and February ended with an injection. Nobody, Lindholm included, can promise the back holds for 82 games.
Vegas comes to TD Garden on Monday night. The question was never really whether Elias Lindholm could be Patrice Bergeron. It's whether, for one full season, his body will let him be Elias Lindholm. 馃惢
Related: Bruins edge Hawks 5-4 in OT 路 Hagens Is Coming. The NHL Isn't Ready. 路 Mittelstadt's summer skating 路 Minten's Rise