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Injured thumb to keep Bruins’ Pastrnak out at least two weeks

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The Boston Bruins may have to be more aggressive than they had originally planned at the trade deadline to replace David Pastrnak, who recently injured his thumb at a team event.

As the Boston Bruins host the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night (7 p.m. ET; NBCSN), they’ll do so without the services of leading scorer David Pastrnak.

According to the team, as Pastrnak was walking to his ride following a sponsorship dinner on Sunday night he fell and injured his left thumb, which required surgery. That injury will keep him sidelined for at least two weeks, after which he’ll be re-evaluated. This should not jeopardize the rest of his 2018-19 NHL season, according to general manager Don Sweeney.

“I met with David yesterday morning,” said general manager Don Sweeney. “He was extremely upset, disappointed. He obviously feels like he let everybody down despite it being an accident.”

The Bruins’ positive spin for this is that it’ll give Pastrnak some time to rest up, but who knows if the injury will affect him once he’s back in the lineup.

Sweeney said on Tuesday that this injury will not affect his plans for the upcoming Feb. 25 trade deadline. If those plans included going out and adding a winger who can score, then yeah, sure. If not, well, that’s a head-scratcher.

The offense on the Bruins drops off after Pastrnak, Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, and David Krejci. Jake DeBrusk is next in points with only 19, compared to Krejci’s 43. As a team they’ve scored 162 goals, averaging 2.88 per night in 56 games. They could use a couple of impactful forwards to help with secondary scoring, espcially with Tuesday’s news.

Artemi Panarin is out there, but will the price be too high for Sweeney to pay? And is he hesitant to go out and make a big deadline splash after the Rick Nash acquisition didn’t pan out a year ago?

“My feeling is that we would like to try and add without necessarily giving up what we know is a big part of our future,” Sweeney said during a season ticket holder event over the weekend, per NHL.com. “We committed assets last year to take a swing where we felt we needed to address an area of need and we will try and do a similar thing this year. I can’t guarantee that’ll happen. This time of the year, prices are generally pretty high, but we’re going to try. We’re going to try because I think we still need it.”

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Sean Leahy is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @Sean_Leahy.