General manager Don Sweeney’s decision to uproot the roster at last year’s trade deadline replenished Boston’s prospect pool and put an arduous rebuild ahead of schedule.

But any talk of the Bruins being a playoff-caliber club this spring felt like a reach for a depth chart still pockmarked with questions.

Get Starting Point

A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.

On paper, the criticisms were valid about the Bruins’ ceiling as a difference-maker in the Eastern Conference. But in practice, Neely found few faults with the type of hockey coach Marco Sturm was going to preach in his first season.

“Our guys did a really good job of putting a roster together that is going to give us that piss and vinegar,” Neely said. “It’s going to be hard to play against, and teams aren’t going to enjoy it.”

With eight games left in the regular season, the Bruins have lived up to Neely’s proclamation.

It’s an identity that Sturm and a scrappy squad of youngsters, journeymen, castoffs, and a few foundational pieces have embraced in a roller-coaster season.

A season that seems destined to carry over into the postseason after a brief one-year hiatus.

“I’m just very proud of my guys,” Sturm said after Sunday’s 4-3 shootout victory in Columbus, Ohio. “They never give up. Never. I’m just happy for them.”

For all of the talk of this team’s flaws — unsustainable underlying D-zone metrics, regression-ready shooting luck, or a “Murderers’ Row” of late-season foes — the Bruins keep clearing hurdles.

In a little more than a week, they have collected several statement victories.

There was a 4-2 win in Detroit on March 21, with Jeremy Swayman stopping 42 shots.

A day after an ugly home loss to the cellar-dwelling Maple Leafs, the Bruins went into Buffalo against the hottest team in the NHL and rallied for a 4-3 win off an OT tally from Pavel Zacha.

On Saturday, the Bruins toppled a Western Conference titan in the Wild, with six Boston skaters posting multi-point games in a 6-3 victory.

And just 24 hours later, the Bruins erased a three-goal deficit with just 13:32 left in regulation — storming back and shocking a red-hot Blue Jackets also scrapping in the Eastern Conference playoff picture.

“We have to have a game like tonight,” Charlie McAvoy said. “We’re down three going into the third, and we come back and win? Then you have belief in it.”

Despite a turnover-ridden opening 20 minutes in which the Bruins relinquished three goals, Sturm stuck with Swayman for the rest of the night.

Starting games on back-to-back days for the first time since November 2021, the Vezina Trophy candidate stopped the final 12 shots that came his way, including two in the shootout.

“He was our best player, but I didn’t want to [pull him]. I didn’t want to give up,” Sturm said.

“I didn’t want to lose that fight.”

In need of a spark, Tanner Jeannot and Mark Kastelic dropped the gloves with 6-foot-5-inch Erik Gudbranson and feared pugilist Mathieu Olivier.

The result? A few bloodied knuckles. An early exit for Olivier. And a much-needed wake-up call for the Bruins.

“We just have so much respect for those guys when they do that … That was the spark of life we needed,” McAvoy said.

McAvoy — one of the pillars of the Bruins’ success this season alongside Swayman and David Pastrnak — made it a 3-1 game with a shot through a screen at 6:29 in the third.

A power-play tally from Zacha made it a one-goal game with 11:17 to go.

And with just 11 seconds left and Boston pushing in a frantic six-on-four sequence, Viktor Arvidsson forced a turnover in Grade-A ice — with Zacha beating goalie Jet Greaves for the equalizer.

It marked Zacha’s 13th goal in the 17 games since the Bruins returned from the Olympic break, as well as Arvidsson’s fifth point of the weekend.

And it was the 21-year-old Fraser Minten — now in a top-line-center role — who scored Boston’s first shootout goal, before Arvidsson sealed the 2 points with a slick backhand tally.

Arvidsson, acquired from the Oilers last summer for a 2027 fifth-round pick, has 21 goals and 47 points in 62 games this season. Altogether, the second line of Zacha, Arvidsson, and Casey Mittelstadt is now outscoring teams, 38-16, at five-on-five.

In five days, the Bruins collected 6 points against some of the toughest opponents in the NHL.

The 2025-26 Bruins are far from a juggernaut. They may not be favored against whoever they draw in a potential first-round series.

But said foe isn’t going to be thrilled to see the Bruins lined up against them.

What the Bruins might lack in talent, they have certainly made up for in resilience, toughness, a locked-in goalie, and plenty of motivated skaters.

In hockey, those traits can take you a long way.

Conor Ryan can be reached at conor.ryan@globe.com.