Marchand calls Bruins fans ‘awesome’ ahead of Boston return with Panthers 

BOSTON -- It was when Brad Marchand was getting ready for dinner on Sunday night -- a meal with former teammates Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara, Tuukka Rask and Adam McQuaid at which they “bullied” him into paying – that it started to truly hit him. He had intellectually understood that he was coming back, back to his home for 16 seasons, back to the city where he’d had his kids, back to where he first learned how to be a professional hockey player, back to where he’d first won the Stanley Cup.

But now? Now the emotions started to bubble.

“I kind of thought about it for the first time last night, being here,” Marchand said, after the Florida Panthers practiced at TD Garden on Monday. “I was actually going to dinner and on the way over, I was kind of thinking about it and started to get a little emotional.

“It kind of hits you when you’re here a little bit more. I haven’t thought about it a ton up until this point. I think that’s probably why I don’t because then I’ll get emotional about it. But it’ll be hard not to. There are too many memories and I was here too long for it not to.”

Marchand did come back last season, mere days after the trade that sent him from the Bruins to the Panthers on March 7, at the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, but he was injured and didn’t play, returning for 10 games down the stretch and the entirety of a Stanley Cup Playoff run that saw him lift the Cup for the second time in his career.

Now, he will be on the ice, facing the Boston Bruins -- and the Bruins fans -- for the first time as an NHL opponent when his Panthers play at TD Garden on Tuesday (7:30 p.m. ET; ESPN, SNO, SNE, SN360, TVAS). And it’s those fans that it will be especially poignant for him to see, especially meaningful.

Over his 1,090 games with the Bruins, Marchand fought for them, bled for them, made them defend him -- and they did so, over and over again, unquestioningly.

They adopted him as their own, writing messages on his takeout coffee cups, patting him on the back when they saw him in the city, cheering him on through three runs to the Stanley Cup Final.

On Monday, Marchand was asked about the best part of Boston. He didn’t hesitate.

“The fans, for sure,” he said. “Hockey-wise. The city’s incredible -- I’ve lived in a bunch of different areas around here and the city’s incredible. But the fans make it awesome. They’re just very unique. Some of the stories and things that I’ve seen fans do -- a lot of them aren’t PG rated -- in playoff runs and stuff like that, it’s so special and I think so unique to this area.”

And while Marchand will have a few familiar faces in the stands on Tuesday, including his family, his in-laws and friends from the area, it is the rest of them, the rest of the people who watched him night after night after night, who made his experience with the Bruins what it was, in so many ways.

“All the way down, they bleed black and gold,” Marchand said. “It’s part of why I think there’s so much pressure on the team to have success and why they focus on it so much is you can’t slip. … You don’t have the ability to slip in the city or you’re going to hear about it. We wanted to produce and be good for the fans and live up to that reputation. So it makes it special to play here.”

Even if he’s wearing a Panthers sweater.

“I’m sure it’s going to be tough. Some people, they won’t be able to cheer because I know they don’t like the Panthers very much, but maybe they’ll like me enough to give a little ‘Yay’ out there or something,” Marchand said. “But yeah, I think that there will be a little bit of love there, maybe if I do something good. If I do something bad, they’ll probably boo me pretty quick.

“But they’re pretty passionate here, so they might have forgot already and treat me like any other Panther player.”

But it hasn’t always been an easy or a simple relationship. Those same fans have questioned Marchand, have criticized him, made his life difficult at points. He once took it personally.

As he got older, though, he began to get them, to find a commonality with them.

“There’s a responsibility that comes with this team, with playing with this team, and that’s what I grew to understand,” Marchand said. “It’s not because they don’t like you. It’s because when you sign up to play here, you sign up to carry the burden of understanding that you need to have success here, and if you don’t, you’re going to hear about it. You better shut up and just take it because you know that when you sign up.

“You go to all these places around the League where people don’t show up and don’t care and they don’t say anything and you don’t hear about hockey when you leave the rink, but this is a real sports city. So when you leave, they care about it. They’ll take it home and wear it to work the next day, just like you do. They don’t just turn the TV off and forget about it. So when you have a fanbase that’s passionate like that, you’ve got to embrace it and appreciate it.”

He will do that on Tuesday, when he gets his coffee and when he arrives at the rink, when he sees the security guards and the fans that have watched him walk out onto the ice for nearly two decades. When he faces those that have loved him for so long.

“I’m just excited about it,” Marchand said. “It’ll be fun to be back here, it’ll be fun to play the Bruins, it’ll be fun to play against teammates, have friends and family in the building again. These are things that, down the road, I think I’ll really appreciate. There’s been enough moments that I kind of went through and I didn’t take it in enough or I didn’t really appreciate it and this is one that I will make sure that I do.”