How Brad Marchand returned from injury a month ahead of schedule
There’s a famous story about Brad Marchand‘s exit meetings in Boston after his rookie season.
Throughout Marchand’s draft process and early in his pro hockey career, he was often reminded of what he couldn’t achieve. NHL teams believed he was too small (a 5-foot-9 forward was especially undersized as he was breaking in). Scouts said Marchand’s skating wasn’t good enough. NHL evaluators believed discipline was an issue. He was told his skill set probably didn’t have a high ceiling.
Marchand, a third-round pick in 2006, got called up to the NHL for a 20-game stint in 2010. “After the year I met with Peter Chiarelli, then the GM, and he said, ‘Look, you got a taste of it, you got to play some games, be around the playoffs, see what the NHL is like,'” Marchand recalls. “He said, ‘Next year, if you can come in and be a good energy player, play on the fourth line, maybe get 10 goals, I think that would be a great year for you.'”
Marchand, who was 21 at the time, didn’t like that outlook. The winger’s response: “I think I could get 20 goals in this league.”
“[Chiarelli] kind of looked at me and laughed,” Marchand said. “I hadn’t scored a goal in the league at that point. I had one assist in 20 games. I hadn’t done much. I think it took him by surprise.”
There’s one thing you should know about Brad Marchand: Set limitations, and it fuels him with determination. He’s often bucking other people’s expectations for him.
Just look at the latest example: He defied doctors and returned more than a month ahead of schedule following double hip surgery, scoring two goals and adding an assist in his first game back this past Thursday.
MARCHAND SCORED 21 GOALS during his sophomore season — and his career has since taken off to heights that perhaps only he imagined. At 34, he is one of the league’s premiere superstars. He’s still pesky — few hound pucks like Marchand does, and he still lives up to his nickname as the “Little Ball of Hate” — but no player in the NHL plays with that edge and consistently puts up his production.
Since that 2010 exit meeting, only Alex Ovechkin, Steven Stamkos, John Tavares and Patrick Kane have scored more goals than Marchand’s 353.
This past offseason, Marchand hit a crossroads. The Bruins were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Carolina Hurricanes in seven games. Fans wondered if Boston’s core was aging out and another Stanley Cup window had closed.
Marchand battled lower body injuries the past several seasons. Despite a groin procedure, and a sports hernia surgery, issues kept flaring up.
Marchand was presented a choice by the Bruins’ medical team: He could get hip surgery, or continue trying to play through it, and try to strengthen his body that way.
“They said, ‘We think you should do the surgery, but it’s up to the player,'” Marchand said. “I didn’t want to miss time. We finished earlier than we had planned to, so that bought me a few more weeks.”
His goal was to play as long as possible, so he decided getting the surgery was a good idea.
Then another decision: Surgery on one hip or both hips? Marchand asked his doctor if they only did one hip, could they guarantee he wouldn’t have to get the other hip done in a few years?
Marchand didn’t want to have to go through this process again at age 36 or 37.
Once the doctor said no, Marchand decided a double hip arthroscopy and labral repair was his best option.
“One of the first things the doctor told me after [surgery] was, ‘You’re lucky you did both, because you would’ve been done in a year or two,” Marchand said. “Because at that point I would’ve needed a whole hip replacement and my career would’ve been over.”
Then the doctor told Marchand something he didn’t want to hear: The recovery timeline was six months. He would be sidelined until American Thanksgiving.
Marchand didn’t like that outlook. So he found a way to change it.
“Personally, I feel like if you’re told something, it’s just a limitation that you’re setting for yourself — or in this case for my recovery,” Marchand said. “Six months, that’s a long time. And especially when I heard the breakdown for why I needed it. Unfortunately it was because I needed extra time to get back in shape. My instant thought was ‘All right, how can we get this done sooner?'”
MARCHAND LEVELED WITH his medical team. “I said, ‘We can do this one of two ways,'” he recalled. “You can help me where I’m doing it, and we make sure I don’t get hurt. Or I’m just going to do it behind your back, because I’m going to do what I feel I need to do to get back early, and I’ll probably injure myself because I don’t know what I should be doing, and I’m going to do it anyway.”
Marchand said he wanted to play opening night. The medical team countered with a more realistic compromise.
Everyone agreed to circle the last week of October on the calendar, roughly five weeks ahead of schedule.
The first part of the rehab process involved rest.
“We had a newborn at home, and I felt worse for my wife than myself,” Marchand said. “I was fine, all I had to do was lay on my couch.”
Then, Marchand returned home to Halifax. He hadn’t been able to spend time at home over the past two summers amid the COVID-19 pandemic and wanted the chance to see family.
Marchand’s trainer in Halifax (Matt MacIntyre) and Boston (Scott Waugh) stayed in constant communication. “Everyone was on the same page,” he said. “Which was important.”
Marchand flew back to Boston every 7-10 days to get checked out.
He wasn’t cleared to skate until October, which was the hardest part. For most of the summer, he also couldn’t lift anything heavier than 20 pounds, so rehab included a lot of stretching and body weight exercises.
“I have a lot of anxiety every summer about my routine, when I’m skating,” Marchand said. “It was very tough to put that aside and accept the fact I can’t do it.”
But he focused on what he could do. To keep his conditioning up, that meant biking.
“I needed to hammer bike rides, so I said give me bike rides where I’m not going to injure myself,” Marchand said. “I started doing two bike rides a day, one at morning one at night, about a month before I was supposed to.”
Marchand agreed with the medical team: If he was feeling sore, he’d take days off. But that happened only a few times.
And by the time he returned to Boston ahead of the season, he was right on track with that late October return.
For Marchand, it all stems back to his philosophy as a player.
“If you’re not setting goals, and you’re not putting things out there that you want to attain, then you’re just being stagnant and there are people around you that will surpass you and work to be better than you,” he said.
Often Marchand’s career has been framed around proving people wrong. He sees it differently: He’s constantly proving himself right.
At 34, he credits his success to his work on the “mental side of the game” — something he devotes more time to as the years go on.
“I don’t think people realize how big that is — how you can change your game and your confidence and perspective of who you are as a player and where you can end up,” he said. “The more work I put into that, the more I realized what I could accomplish in the league.”
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Kiley McDaniel
MLB held its fourth annual draft lottery at the winter meetings in Orlando on Tuesday, and the Chicago White Sox landed the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 MLB draft.
It’s still very early in the draft process, but it’s a perfect time for a quick five-pick mini-mock draft to see how things could play out in July. Four of the five players in last winter’s edition of this exercise landed in the top 11 picks on draft day, so it’s fair to think we have a reasonable idea of how the top picks will play out even though a lot can change in the seven months ahead.
Here is my early prediction for the first five picks in the 2026 MLB draft, after consulting with industry sources combined with my own scouting.
1. Chicago White Sox: Roch Cholowsky, SS, UCLA
Cholowsky was a big name in the 2023 draft, ranking 32nd on my final board as a standout defender with solid tools, but questions on his overall offensive upside along with a big asking price. His bonus price wasn’t met and he was solid as a freshman at UCLA, then took a huge jump forward as a sophomore, hitting 23 home runs last season.
He is still a standout defender but now both his (above-average) hit and (plus) power tools have developed, allowing evaluators to go back over the last decade and find comps at the tops of previous drafts, like Dansby Swanson or Troy Tulowitzki. Cholowsky has a pretty solid lead on the pack for the top pick right now, but it isn’t insurmountable due to the solid group of up-the-middle, high-upside talents in this class.
The lottery couldn’t have gone better for the White Sox after a 102-loss season, landing the top pick in a year where there is a clear preseason favorite to be the top pick. Chase Meidroth and Colson Montgomery are solid shortstop options in the big leagues with Caleb Bonemer and Billy Carlson as Top 100 types in the low minors, but Cholowsky would give the White Sox a great problem: too many good players at the most important position on the field.
2. Tampa Bay Rays: Grady Emerson, SS, Fort Worth Christian (Texas) HS, Texas commit
Emerson has been touted as the top prep prospect in the 2026 class for years and has held that title through the summer showcase season and fall workouts. He’s a 6-foot-2, left-handed hitting shortstop who projects as above average to plus at almost everything on the field. He may not be truly plus-plus at anything right now, but he’s still only 17 years old, so that could develop.
Given his long track record of being an elite prospect and being in the most desirable player demographic in the draft, he’s a consensus talent in this pick area, even for teams that don’t normally take high school players at the top. The Rays are not that team, taking a prep shortstop in the top two rounds in each of the last three drafts; Tampa Bay also loves left-handed hitters. Emerson is the rare prep prospect who is a safer pick than the vast majority of college players but also comes with more upside.
3. Minnesota Twins: Justin Lebron, SS, Alabama
Lebron was scouted as part of the loaded 2023 prep class alongside prep teammate Antonio Jimenez, who was a third-round pick of the Mets out of UCF in 2025. Lebron’s hitability and athleticism each jumped a tick right when he got to Tuscaloosa and the 6-foot-2 shortstop is now a plus runner, thrower and defender with above-average raw power. His pitch selection is fine with the only question being about his bat-to-ball ability due to worse-than-average miss rates last season, fueled somewhat by an uphill, power-driven approach. If Lebron can find a happy medium between his swing plane, contact and power, he could challenge Cholowsky as the top pick.
The Twins haven’t been scared of a little swing-and-miss if it comes with big upside in recent drafts, like with Billy Amick, Brandon Winokur and Quentin Young the last three years, but also love taking collegiate shortstops like Kaelen Culpepper, Marek Houston and Kyle DeBarge. Lebron threads the needle of certainty given his tools and positional profile but also untapped upside due to his contact/power balance being a little off kilter at the moment.
4. San Francisco Giants: Drew Burress, CF, Georgia Tech
Burress was a pick to click of mine in the 2023 draft, ranking 40th overall on my board (among the highest ranks among media and teams), but ultimately proving unsignable to the teams that also had him in that range. He stands only 5-foot-8, so impact power wasn’t expected at that point, but he had more power than you might think given his size, along with a long track record of hitting for average, plus speed and center-field defense.
Burress exploded at Georgia Tech, particularly when it comes to power — hitting 25 homers as a freshman then 19 in his sophomore year — fueled by what is now above-average raw power. He grades as above average or plus in all five tools, but his approach/swing is more power-oriented than in high school, so balancing his abilities at the plate in pro ball could be key to reaching his ceiling. The Giants have picked college position players with their top three picks each of the last two years and will likely be staring at a best available player from that same demographic in 2026.
5. Pittsburgh Pirates: A.J. Gracia, OF, Virginia
Gracia had almost no national scouting profile coming out of a New Jersey high school as a two-way player in 2023 before heading to Duke. He immediately showed scouts he should’ve been considered a real pro prospect out of high school, hitting .305 with 14 homers as a freshman, then following it up with more walks, fewer strikeouts and 15 homers as a sophomore. Gracia transferred to Virginia after the season, following much of the Duke coaching staff.
He is a 6-foot-3 center/right field tweener for now who is above average at almost everything in the batter’s box, especially his ability to lift/pull the ball in games, though his swing can get too uphill at times.
The Pirates seem to be turning the corner with Konnor Griffin and Bubba Chandler joining Paul Skenes and Co. while they’re also looking to spend money in free agency, so I see them leaning into the college position-player group that is a strength in this class.
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Dan Murphy
After another week of frustrating setbacks, at the end of a frustrating year trying to bring stability to their industry, a growing number of college athletic directors say they are interested in exploring a once-unthinkable option: collective bargaining with their players.
Dozens of athletic directors will gather in Las Vegas over the next few days for an annual conference. They had hoped to be raising toasts to the U.S. House of Representatives. But for the second time in three months, House members balked last week at voting on a bill that would give the NCAA protection from antitrust lawsuits and employment threats. So instead, they will be greeted by one of the Strip’s specialties: the cold-slap realization of needing a better plan.
“I’m not sure I can sit back today and say I’m really proud of what we’ve become,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey told ESPN late last week. “There is a solution. We just have to work together to find it, and maybe collective bargaining is it.”
Athletic directors see only two paths to a future in which the college sports industry can enforce rules and defend them in court: Either Congress grants them an exemption from antitrust laws, or they collectively bargain with athletes. As Dickey said, and others have echoed quietly in the past several days, it has become irresponsible to continue to hope for an antitrust bailout without at least fully kicking the tires on the other option.
“If Congress ends up solving it for us, and it ends up being a healthy solution I’ll be the first one to do cartwheels down the street,” said Tennessee athletic director Danny White when speaking to ESPN about his interest in collective bargaining months ago. “But what are the chances they get it right when the NCAA couldn’t even get it right? We should be solving it ourselves.”
Some athletic directors thought they had solved their era of relative lawlessness back in July. The NCAA and its schools agreed to pay $2.8 billion in the House settlement to purchase a very expensive set of guardrails meant to put a cap on how much teams could spend to acquire players. The schools also agreed to fund the College Sports Commission, a new agency created by the settlement to police those restrictions.
But without an antitrust exemption, any school or player who doesn’t like a punishment they receive for bursting through those guardrails can file a lawsuit and give themselves a pretty good chance of wiggling out of a penalty. The CSC’s plan — crafted largely by leaders of the Power 4 conferences — to enforce those rules without an antitrust exemption was to get all their schools to sign a promise that they wouldn’t file any such lawsuits. On the same day that Congress’ attempt crumbled last week, seven state attorneys general angrily encouraged their schools not to sign the CSC’s proposed agreement.
In the wake of the attorneys general’s opposition, a loose deadline to sign the agreement came and went, with many schools declining to participate. So, college football is steamrolling toward another transfer portal season without any sheriff that has the legal backing to police how teams spend money on building their rosters.
That’s why college sports fans have heard head football coaches like Lane Kiffin openly describe how they negotiated for the biggest player payroll possible in a system where all teams are supposed to be capped at the same $20.5 million limit. Right now, the rules aren’t real. The stability promised as part of the House settlement doesn’t appear to be imminent. Meanwhile, the tab for potential damages in future antitrust lawsuits continues to grow larger with each passing day.
Collective bargaining isn’t easy, either. Under the current law, players would need to be employees to negotiate a legally binding deal. The NCAA and most campus leaders are adamantly opposed to turning athletes into employees for several reasons, including the added costs and infrastructure it would require.
The industry would need to make tough decisions about which college athletes should be able to bargain and how to divide them into logical groups. Should the players be divided by conference? Should all football players negotiate together? What entity would sit across from them at the bargaining table?
On Monday, Athletes.Org, a group that has been working for two years to become college sports’ version of a players’ union, published a 35-page proposal for what an agreement might look like. Their goal was to show it is possible to answer the thorny, in-the-weeds questions that have led many leaders in college sports to quickly dismiss collective bargaining as a viable option.
Multiple athletic directors and a sitting university president are taking the proposal seriously — a milestone for one of the several upstart entities working to gain credibility as a representative for college athletes. Syracuse chancellor and president Kent Syverud said Monday that he has long felt the best way forward for college sports is a negotiation where athletes have “a real collective voice in setting the rules.”
“[This template] is an important step toward that kind of partnership-based framework,” he said in a statement released with AO’s plan. “… I’m encouraged to see this conversation happening more openly, so everyone can fully understand what’s at stake.”
White, the Tennessee athletic director, has also spent years working with lawyers to craft a collective bargaining option. In his plan, the top brands in college football would form a single private company, which could then employ players. He says that would provide a solution in states where employees of public institutions are not legally allowed to unionize.
“I don’t understand why everyone’s so afraid of employment status,” White said. “We have kids all over our campus that have jobs. … We have kids in our athletic department that are also students here that work in our equipment room, and they have employee status. How that became a dirty word, I don’t get it.”
White said athletes could be split into groups by sport to negotiate for a percentage of the revenue they help to generate.
The result could be expensive for schools. Then again, paying lawyers and lobbyists isn’t cheap either. The NCAA and the four power conferences combined to spend more than $9 million on lobbyists between 2021 and 2024, the latest year where public data is available. That’s a relatively small figure compared to the fees and penalties they could face if they continue to lose antitrust cases in federal court.
“I’m not smart enough to say [collective bargaining] is the only answer or the best answer,” Dickey said. “But I think the onus is on us to at least curiously question: How do you set something up that can be sustainable? What currently is happening is not.”
Players and coaches are frustrated with the current system, wanting to negotiate salaries and build rosters with a clear idea of what rules will actually be enforced. Dickey says fans are frustrated as they invest energy and money into their favorite teams without understanding what the future holds. And athletic directors, who want to plan a yearly budget and help direct their employees, are frustrated too.
“It has been very difficult on campus. I can’t emphasize that enough,” White said. “It’s been brutal in a lot of ways. It continues to be as we try to navigate these waters without a clear-cut solution.”
This week White and Dickey won’t be alone in their frustration. They’ll be among a growing group of peers who are pushing to explore a new solution.
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