Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli spoke at last night's State of the Bruins event

Good morning and happy NHL 12 release day! We’ll be talking more about EA Sports’ latest hockey release later, but for now here are your links from the internets.

Around the Hub…

The Bruins’ rookies took the ice for their first of two rookie games with the New York Islanders, cruising to an 8-5 victory Monday night. Here’s a brief recap from WEEI.com’s DJ Bean on the “Big Bad Blog”

The annual “State of the Bruins” gathering took place at the TD Garden last night where new banners were displayed from the previous five Stanley Cup champion Bruin squads (of course banner No. 6 will be hung on Oct. 6 against Philly). NESN’s Doug Flynn has a recap of last night’s event.

Brad Marchand spoke at the Bruins’ annual golf tournament in Bolton yesterday and explains that he, agent Wade Arnott and Boston GM Peter Chiarelli are “working hard every day on a new deal” ESPN Boston’s Joe McDonald explains.

While his career is still in doubt, Marc Savard will still be getting his name engraved on the Stanley Cup along with the rest of the 2010-11 Bruins (via Matt Kalman of The Bruins Blog)

Joe Haggerty of CSN New England reports that Zdeno Chara will miss the start of Training Camp to attend the funeral of Pavol Demitra, who was tragically killed during the plane crash in Russia last week that carried the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl (KHL) on their way to their first game of the 2011-12 season.

Around the league

As mentioned above, it’s NHL 12 release day. Puck Daddy’s Sean Leahy posted the live stream of the launch party for those who missed it.

Blackhawks forward Patrick Sharp had emergency appendectomy after feeling some abdominal pain and will miss the pre-season, but could be back in time for the start of their regular season on Oct. 7th against the Stars. Here’s a brief press release from the Blackhawks’ official website

Six teams are still without captains entering the start of training camp — the Flyers, Islanders, Sabres, Avalanche, Panthers and Devils — says NHL.com.

Speaking of the Devils, the New York Post report yesterday — that was also linked here on the Daily links — about the team facing bankruptcy was “inaccurate” according to their team statement, which was posted by The Bergen Record’s Tom Gulitti on the Fire and Ice blog.

Finally, we might be about two and a half years away from the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and while there’s still uncertainty on whether or not the NHL will be represented, there has been a significant amount of progress in Sochi’s hockey home for the 2014 games according to Russian website Vestnik Kavkaza.