Hockey Fights has logged the Charlie McAvoy and Bobby Brink scrum from last night, the one that got the Bruins defenseman tossed in Boston.
It came with the Bruins down 5-2 in the third period against the Wild, in a night that also saw Nikita Zadorov take a 10-minute misconduct. We covered Charlie McAvoy's escort down the tunnel on Saturday night, but the full sequence is worth a second look.
Michael Russo set out how it started: Connor Clifton slashed Brink and hit him hard during the shift. Then McAvoy and Brink dropped the gloves, and Clifton jumped in as a third man while the referees huddled.
Dylan Loucks saw the other half of it. McAvoy caught Brink up high, Brink was furious and came in to fight, and McAvoy won it before getting thrown out.
Jack Studley had the play-by-play: Clifton got in the way, Brink ended up on the ground, and McAvoy was escorted straight down the tunnel.
Hockey Fights flagged it as "not a HockeyFight" and listed it as a scrum, with Brink drawing two minutes for roughing. McAvoy took four for roughing, and the penalties set up a Wild 5-on-3 at a point when the game was already gone.
Does the McAvoy scrum matter for the Bruins this week?
Not on the scoreboard. The game was decided long before McAvoy hit the tunnel, and he had already gone minus-4 over 24:34 of ice time with 6 penalty minutes in the books.
The damage is to the mood around a team that Marco Sturm admitted isn't a Cup contender yet. A misconduct for Zadorov and an ejection for McAvoy in the same period, on top of a 6-2 loss, is a bad look for a group that has dropped two straight.
Clifton started the sequence with the slash and the hit, and McAvoy finished it by catching Brink high. Both sides of that are on the Bruins, and the Wild got a 5-on-3 out of it. I don't love that trade-off for a defenseman the Bruins lean on for big minutes.
McAvoy has 9 points in 14 games this season, one goal and eight assists. He is also 2 assists away from 300 for his career, a milestone that now sits next to a night he'd like to forget.
The Bruins are off Sunday and practice Monday at Warrior, where Sturm will get his first chance to address it. Tuesday brings the Kings to Boston, and Los Angeles has lost four straight.
This article was written with the help of artificial intelligence, based on public reports and official sources.
Who deserves the most blame for the third-period mess against the Wild?
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