If you’re looking reasons for why the 2024-25 season went off the rails, there are plenty of candidates at which to point.

But chief among them has to be the failure of Elias Lindholm to live up to his seven-year contract that is paying him $7.75 million per season. He was hired to be David Pastrnak’s centerman, as enviable a role as you could find in the National Hockey League. Yet it did not work right out of the gate. Lindholm looked a hair slow in just about everything he did, the two seemed to be on different pages and, about 10 games in, they were broken up.

On Thursday, Lindholm gave a clue for why it may not have worked early on – at least Bruins’ fans can hope it’s the reason. The centerman revealed that he had suffered a back injury in early August, which was the reason why he missed almost all of training camp after trying to give it a go on his first day. And for much of the first half of the season, he looked like a player dealing with a back injury.

But when he was put between Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie after the trade deadline, Lindholm looked a lot closer to the two-way pivot he was signed to be. And while he was more of a defensive conscience for the two shooters, he did have 15 points (6-9) in the last 16 games after the deadline. He finished with 17-30-47 totals and, despite the early back troubles, he played all 82 games,, the seventh time he’s played 80 or more games in a season.

“I was chasing it for a long time there, couldn’t do too much on the ice or off the ice,” said Lindholm at the Bruins’ breakup day on Thursday. “I felt like I was behind, and tried to get back in shape to play on a high level, but felt like I was behind for a long time. But yeah, definitely at the end, I started feeling better and started playing better.”

Lindholm may have never attained the hand-in-glove on-ice relationship that Pastrnak had with previous centermen like Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci. But the 30-year-old Swede gradually started to learned how to play with Pastrnak.

“We played some games (together) here and there, but obviously you sit there and watch, and you kind of understand what he likes to do out there,” said Lindholm.” And obviously it was fun to watch this year and see a top player like that to perform and help our team for a long, long time. It was impressive.”

Defenseman Nikita Zadorov knows Lindholm better than anyone on the B’s team. He played with him in Calgary and, at the tail end of last season, in Vancouver. The big defenseman defended his long-time teammates and believes we’ll see a better version of him next season.

“He is a leader, definitely, and you can see the past seven, eight games when they put him with Pasta, with the way he’s been playing, that’s what we expect of him,” said Zadorov. “Obviously, he had some stuff he was dealing with in the year. There’s no excuses, obviously, but I’ve seen him at his best. I’ve been with him for the past five years and I know what he can be and he’s an unbelievable playoff competitor as well. It’s up to us, and he’s going to have a bounce-back year, for sure. You look at the points and, yeah, he didn’t produce points. But you don’t see the stuff he does good, like faceoffs and (penalty kill), he plays power play, he’s a great complementary player. He’s always in position. For a D-man, he’s the perfect center to play around. That stuff gets put away a little bit over his point production where you guys like to look all the time, but there’s definitely more to his game that he’s been bringing and he’s been helping this team as well.”

Barring a miracle deliverance of a veteran No. 1 centerman, the B’s need a Lindholm-Pastrnak partnership to work. Pavel Zacha played well between Pastrnak and Geekie but he was moved out of there because of lack of depth issues on the wing, issues that will most likely carry over to next season. While it is tough to judge Casey Mittelstadt until we see him with some top-six wings, which hopefully will happen in free agency (Nikolaj Ehlers? Brock Boeser?), he hasn’t shown the ability to win enough battles to be a first line center. Fraser Minten and Matt Poitras are not ready for that kind of duty and it’s not clear that a first-line role will ever be their calling.

The late-season returns of the Pastrnak-Lindholm duo suggest that it can work. The question, is how much value should you put on down-the-stretch performance of a player on an also-ran team? Interim coach Joe Sacco believes Lindholm’s late-season play should not be dismissed.

“(Lindholm) gives (Pastrnak and Geekie) the opportunity to tilt a little bit more (offensively), knowing that they still have security defensively. Somebody who’s going to play underneath the puck, be reliable defensively for them,” said Sacco. “He got more confident down the stretch there. I know that those games at some point become less meaningful in the standings, but they’re not. They’re not less meaningful as far as how we look at it as an organization and how we talk about it with the players, the importance of those games down the stretch, the last 10 games. I do think there’s some value there, as far as watching him play with those guys and just to see if that’s a possibility moving in the next season.”

For a fandom looking for some hope in the rubble of a lost season, that is at least something.