Boston Bruins forward Morgan Geekie can finish a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute.

“I mean, right now I’d be pretty rusty,” he said. “I’m not insane, like those kids that you see on TV, but I’m pretty good at them.”

When Geekie was around 10 years old, a cousin taught him how to speed solve the puzzle. While some have never found a way to line up that mosaic of colors despite years of trying, Geekie said it’s doable once one cracks the code. One summer at their lake cottage, his cousin wrote down its patterns. Geekie spent two weeks memorizing them and working out solutions while fiddling with the cube.

“It’s basically just all algorithms. You just do the same moves all the time once you get the pieces in the right spot. Once you do that, I mean, it’s pretty cut and dry. Everything goes in order,” he said. “I haven’t really forgot. It’s just one of those things that once you know it, you know it.”

Perhaps Geekie just knows how to score goals now, too.

That’s the simplest rationalization for the 27-year-old’s unexpected transformation into one of the NHL’s premier goal scorers. Through 34 games, Geekie is second in the NHL with 24 goals, trailing only the dominant Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche (28). Going back to the start of last season, Geekie is tied for 11th in goals scored (57).

Geekie scored 33 goals in 2024-25, which is 16 more than his previous career high set two years ago with the Bruins. He shot 22%, which obliterated his previous career best of 13.1% set in 2023-24.

There’s always an offensive player whose unexpected scoring surge in one season makes him the consensus choice for regression the following season. Entering this season, that player was Geekie.

He was the first player listed on ESPN’s rundown of regression candidates, with the expectation that he would top out at 26 goals. Sports Illustrated did the same thing, writing that his “offensive numbers are set to dip next season.” Daily Faceoff wrote that Geekie’s shooting percentage was “a strong indication that his performance isn’t sustainable, at least at this level” for the Bruins.

Geekie gets it. He called the predictions “a fair statement” given that he was scoring less than 10 goals in a season with the Seattle Kraken just a few seasons ago.

“I see it all. It’s an easy cherry to pick to be like, ‘Obviously he’s shooting 22%, it’s going to go down.’ It didn’t bother me at all,” Geekie said.

Rather than regress, Geekie has progressed this season. Through 34 games, he is shooting 28.2%.

“I mean, it’s got to go down at some point,” he said, with a laugh. “Like I said, I don’t really pay attention to that and I’m not somebody that has 10 shots a game, so I just try to make the most of my opportunities when I get the puck.”

GEEKIE IS AMUSED by the focus on his shooting percentage, because he feels there are easy explanations for it. The first is that he doesn’t believe he shoots the puck all that much. Over the past two seasons, David Pastrnak averaged 3.79 shots per game in 110 games. Geekie averaged 2.11 in that same span. Only Sidney Crosby (2.45 shots per game) has a lower average than Geekie (2.48) among the top 10 goal-scorers this season.

“I feel like I’m a big quality over quantity person,” he said.

His first season in Boston, coach Jim Montgomery stressed the need for Geekie to get chances from deep inside the attacking zone.

“I think a high-danger chance is better than just shooting it from the wall. That’s kind of the mentality that I’ve had always. I’m not trying to waste shots that aren’t good for anybody,” Geekie said. “Unless I’m trying to create something off it, I’m honestly not trying to put it on net. Maybe that’s why I end up where I end up.”

Pastrnak recently said the Bruins were reminding Geekie to shoot the puck more often. In fairness, Geekie is shooting more this season. Pastrnak said Geekie is “definitely trying to be a little more selfish to take them” when he fights into high-danger areas of the ice. But Geekie acknowledged there are sometimes philosophical differences between his striving for quality over his team’s desire for quantity.

“I think it’s a push and pull,” he said. “It’s like, I don’t think I need to be shooting this, but other people think that it still gives us an opportunity to create a chance. So I just try to keep that in mind when I have the puck”

This is Geekie’s seventh season in the NHL. He was selected by the Carolina Hurricanes with the 67th pick in the 2017 draft as a goal-scoring forward with the WHL Tri-City Americans. His first two seasons as a pro were mostly spent in the AHL with the Charlotte Checkers, before playing 36 games with the Hurricanes in 2020-21.

That summer, the Seattle Kraken held their expansion draft as the NHL’s newest team. Geekie was left off Carolina’s protected list. At the time, it wasn’t expected that former Hurricanes GM Ron Francis would select him for the Kraken, with options like defenseman Jake Bean and forward Nino Niederreiter available from Carolina. But Geekie was the choice, a player whom Francis had drafted while with the Canes.

Geekie had 22 points in 73 games in his first season in Seattle, skating 12:36 per game with just seven goals. His second campaign saw him jump to 28 points in 69 games, but with even less ice time (10:27).

He was a restricted free agent after the 2022-23 season. Francis attempted to re-sign him before the deadline for submitting qualifying offers, but Geekie and his representatives declined it. The two sides couldn’t find common ground. Rather than go to arbitration, where the Kraken weren’t keen on Geekie potentially setting the terms of his next deal, they chose not to qualify him, making him an unrestricted free agent.

“With Morgan, we did make what I felt was a pretty fair offer,” Francis said at the time, via Sound of Hockey. “It didn’t work out, and he has the right once we don’t qualify him to go elsewhere.”

And so he went to Boston, signing a two-year deal worth $4 million in total.

While he wasn’t seeing much time with the Kraken, Geekie felt he was improving as a player. He said a “integral part” of that development was thanks to Jonathan Sigalet, a skills coach who improved all facets of his game.

“When I first started working with him, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to try and make me play like I’m on the first line,” Geekie recalled. “He said, ‘We both know that trying to do things that you do on the first line on the fourth line is going to get you in the press box.'”

He said working with Siglet slowed the game down for him. He started to see the game differently. He began to see “little tendencies” that all of the NHL’s good players share. Geekie also appreciated having a “third party” assessment for his play, apart from that of his coaches and his own.

Geekie was immediately given an opportunity to thrive in Boston in 2023-24, playing 15:21 in his first game with the Bruins. He ended up averaging 15:25 per game, with 17 goals and 22 assists in 76 games. He earned time with Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha on the Bruins’ top line.

His follow-up season didn’t start well. Geekie scored one goal in his first 17 games and was a healthy scratch early in the season. Some trade whispers started about him as a pending restricted free agent. He had eight goals by the end of the 2024 calendar year.

How did he end up with 33 of them? With one of the greatest goal-scoring heaters this side of Alex Ovechkin: Geekie scored 14 goals in his last 20 games of the season. His chemistry with Pastrnak was undeniable — the Bruins scoring ace assisted on 21 of Geekie’s 33 goals last season.

Geekie expressed a desire to stay with the Bruins. The feeling was mutual, as GM Don Sweeney in June handed him a six-year, $33 million contract for a team-friendly $5.5 million annual cap hit.

WHEN GEEKIE SIGNED his new contract, he decided he wanted to join in the tradition of NHL players celebrating a windfall with their teammates. It’s usually a dinner or something of that nature.

But Geekie wanted to do something different.

“Everybody’s eating at the same restaurants in every city. And I’m sure they’d remember it for a little while, but I think it would be just one of those things like, ‘Hey, thanks for dinner.’ So I wanted to do something a little more nostalgic,” he said.

Geekie is a huge baseball fan who played competitively until his late teens. He was in the process of designing a personalized baseball glove for himself through a company called 44 Pro Custom Gloves when his wife, Emma, suggested that he design ones for all of his teammates as a gift.

Geekie started the process in July, sketching out what he wanted on the gloves for 30 teammates — including players that were on the bubble for the Bruins’ roster this season. He had the biographical information for them, from their birth cities and countries to their schools to where they played junior hockey.

“Honestly, for probably three weeks, I just sat in front of my TV watching baseball and I would just draft gloves up. I thought it was so fun,” Geekie said. “My wife got sick of me for a little while.”

He would FaceTime his brother Noah, a coach at Okotoks Dawgs Academy in Alberta, to bounce the designs off him and get input. He was cognizant of having the designs as unique as possible, despite some of the school colors being similar for his teammates.

Before a practice in October, Geekie delivered the gloves to the locker room stalls of his teammates. It went over well.

“Baseball is not that big in Sweden, but it’s obviously cool to have,” center Elias Lindholm told the Bruins website, having received a glove with a Swedish flag on it. “Hopefully, when my kids get a little bit older, we can play a little game or something. For now, it is just going to be at home, resting.”

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Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins

Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins

While the gloves were a chance to celebrate with his teammates, there weren’t many celebrations anticipated for Boston this season. The Bruins were trading players away at last season’s trade deadline, sending mainstays like captain Brad Marchand (Florida), center Charlie Coyle (Colorado) and defenseman Brandon Carlo (Toronto) elsewhere. They had an incoming first-year coach in Marco Sturm. At best, it was supposed to be a transition year for the Bruins.

But through 34 games, Boston is second in the Atlantic Division with a 20-14-0 record, within a point of division-leading Detroit in the crowded Eastern Conference.

Many around the NHL were surprised. Geekie wasn’t.

“We underperformed. Last season was like the perfect storm of bad events with our kind of discombobulated training camp and then having a coaching change and just kind of everything that could have went wrong went wrong,” Geekie said. “The core group we have is just too good to be written off. But I understand why people had doubts about us.”

But defying doubts is what Morgan Geekie’s all about, whether it’s his team’s predicted finish in the standings or his own predicted regression as a scorer.

“He has everything to score 50 in this league,” Pastrnak said. “He has a heck of a shot. He has the goal-scoring instincts. He is going to get it one day.”

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Former University of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron announced Wednesday that he is ending his campaign for lieutenant governor of Alabama to pursue a sports-related opportunity.

McCarron did not disclose the details of the new position but said “football is calling my name once again.” The announcement comes two months after McCarron announced his bid for office.

“My football position will require the same 100% focus, commitment, and attention that I was prepared to give to the office of lieutenant governor, so it is time to end my campaign,” McCarron said.

McCarron, who led the Crimson Tide to back-to-back championships and played for the Cincinnati Bengals in the NFL, announced in October that he was running in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor.

McCarron had leaned into the fact that he was a first-time candidate. In the statement ending his campaign, McCarron said, “it is time for political newcomers and conservative outsider candidates” to get involved.

Records from the Alabama secretary of state’s office indicated that McCarron first registered to vote in Alabama in October, days before announcing his candidacy.

McCarron did not rule out a future bid for office. “I may return to the political playing field once my career on the football field has truly run its course,” he said.

McCarron was the Crimson Tide’s starting quarterback and led the team to national championship wins in the 2012 and 2013 seasons. He was a runner-up for the Heisman Trophy and went on to play for the Bengals and other NFL teams.

He had been the latest figure looking to channel sports fame into a political win. Former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020 and is now running for governor of Alabama. Former Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl had flirted with the idea of running for Senate, but decided against it.

The Alabama primaries are May 19.

Boston College linebacker Bryce Steele, who overcame several bouts with cancer to continue playing football, was one of three winners of college football’s Comeback Player of the Year Award announced Wednesday.

Also honored were Liberty defensive back Christian Bodnar, who resumed his career this season after recovering from brain inflammation caused by his immune system’s overreaction to a prior infection, and South Florida quarterback Byrum Brown, who broke his leg in 2024 and returned to lead the nation in total offense this season.

Since 2018, the Comeback Player of the Year Award has recognized college football players for overcoming injury, illness or other circumstances. The award is voted on by Associated Press Top 25 voters and sports information directors from around the country. The players will honored at the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 8 in Glendale, Arizona.

Steele, a fifth-year senior from Raleigh, North Carolina, was diagnosed with cancer in 2019. Boston College continued to recruit him even though he didn’t play his junior season in high school. He underwent surgery and radiation and, despite dealing with recurrences in 2021 and 2022, was able to emerge as a promising player for the Eagles.

In 2023, a routine scan revealed cancer spreading across the lining of his chest wall. It was recommended he undergo a career-ending surgery, but he instead chose to go through aggressive chemotherapy. The treatment resulted in only minimal improvement, and he underwent a 15-hour surgery in October 2023, losing part of his diaphragm and spending weeks relearning to walk and breathe.

He resumed training in late 2023 and eventually was able to return to practice and for the final four games in 2024. Steele played in nine games this season, starting two, and made 16 tackles, recovered a fumble, broke up a pass and had a quarterback hurry.

Bodnar, a redshirt sophomore from Brandon, Florida, fell ill in the middle of the 2024 season with post-infectious encephalitis. The condition causes the immune system to go into overdrive while reacting to a routine illness and attack the central nervous system. Brain swelling left him unable to walk, and he was hospitalized for a week. He wasn’t medically cleared until January. He regained his starting job this season, started all 12 games and made 44 tackles.

Brown, a senior from Raleigh, North Carolina, had his breakout 2024 season ended by a broken leg. He missed the last eight games and went through a rehabilitation process that had him spending six hours a day working to restore strength and mobility.

He returned this season to lead the Bulls to wins over ranked opponents Boise State and Florida on the way to a 9-3 record. His 347.2 yards per game in total offense and 42 touchdowns responsible for (28 passing, 14 rushing) lead the nation.