There is a lot that the 3-3 Bruins are still figuring out two weeks into the season. With new faces and injuries to Craig Smith and Nick Foligno, it’s not too surprising that the Bruins’ bottom three lines and defense pairings remain a work in progress.
As a result, the Bruins are a team that needs to lean on its stars right now, probably more than they would like. Unfortunately, those stars struggled on the Bruins’ two-game road trip to Florida and Carolina this week, and it’s a big reason why they return home with a pair of losses in which they were outscored 7-1.
It’s possible the Bruins would’ve lost both these games even if the likes of Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, David Pastrnak, Taylor Hall and Charlie McAvoy had produced more. The Panthers and Hurricanes look like two of the best teams in the NHL early on, with a combined 13-0-0 record between them. But with the big guns being silenced, the Bruins stood no chance whatsoever.
The team’s only goal in these two games was a Charlie Coyle centering pass that banked in off a Panthers player.
The Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak line found itself frustrated by a pair of tough matchups at five-on-five and ineffective on the power play, resulting in the rare occasion of the three of them going back-to-back games without a single point between them.
On Wednesday, the Bruins got outshot 8-4 and outscored 1-0 with their top line on the ice at five-on-five, with Florida’s top line of Carter Verhaege, Aleksander Barkov and Anthony Duclair and top defense pairing of MacKenzie Weegar and Aaron Ekblad doing most of the damage.
On Thursday, that trio once again struggled to generate much of anything through two periods before finally creating some chances a little too late in the third. That came while mostly matched up with Carolina’s third line of Nino Niederreiter, Jordan Staal and Jesper Fast.
The shortcomings on the power play were even more egregious. The Bruins had plenty of chances on the man advantage Thursday, as the Hurricanes gave them five of them, including a pair of five-on-threes -- one for 1:01 and another for 20 seconds. In a total of 7:07 on the power play, though, the Bruins mustered just a single shot on goal.
They struggled to even get set up much of the night, turning the puck over on their entries numerous times. When they actually did, they proceeded to over-pass, looking for the perfect shot instead of just getting the puck to the net and banging away. A Bergeron tripping penalty ended one power play and a too many men on the ice penalty cut off the last few seconds of another.
The second five-on-three, the one for a full minute, was pretty much the last gasp for the Bruins on Thursday. They trailed 2-0 at the time and there were 13 minutes left in the game. Score there, and perhaps the comeback is on.
Things got off to an ominous start when Bergeron lost the faceoff (and Bergeron uncharacteristically lost three of the four power-play faceoffs he took on the night), then turned the puck over on a blind pass to the slot right after getting it back.
Charlie McAvoy getting knocked offsides forced David Pastrnak to circle back and regroup on the next attempted zone entry. Then Pastrnak immediately proceeded to turn the puck over, something that happened far too often these last two games. The only shot attempt the Bruins ended up getting on the five-on-three was a point shot from Mike Reilly off his back leg that was easily deflected out of play -- a far cry from the kind of grade-A chances you expect to get with a two-man advantage.
Pastrnak let another scoring opportunity go to waste on a four-on-four late in the second period as well. He found himself leading a two-on-one, but instead of taking the shot himself, he tried to make a pass over to Hall that got broken up.
“Right now it’s not going in for a couple guys. Guys like Pasta, he’s had a few odd-man rushes now where nothing’s happening,” Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said. “He needs to bear down on those if we’re going to win close games when we’re not scoring a lot. If we’re scoring a lot and it doesn’t happen, that’s fine. But lately, a couple two-on-ones where he has to understand he’s a goal-scorer in this league, a proven goal-scorer. And we need that mentality from him a little bit more.”
Hall would be another guy it’s not going in for. Marchand twice set him up for doorstep tap-ins on the power play, which were easily the two best power-play chances the Bruins got. The first he either whiffed on or had it skip over his stick. The second he managed to send across the crease and out the other side, with Jaccob Slavin possibly just getting his stick on Hall’s at the last second.
“We’re just not in sync right now,” Marchand said of the power play, which is now 2-for-16 on the season. “I just think that we might be forcing it a little bit, where typically we get pucks back, and maybe we’re trying to rush to make a play and kind of getting our spots and getting set up. And then we’re getting frustrated and it kind of snowballs from there. I think we just have to calm down out there and win battles. It kind of starts from there.
“We’ve always been a power play that we thrive when we win battles and get pucks back and to the net, win another battle, the PK gets tired, and we capitalize. We have to get back to doing that and realize what kind of power-play unit we are. We could’ve had one. There was one there that Hallsy missed on. We get that and it could turn the tide of the game. That’s how it goes sometimes. Sometimes you get the bounces and sometimes you don’t.”
The safe bet here is that the Bruins’ top guys are going to get on track both at five-on-five and on the power play, and probably sooner rather than later. There is a lot of history that tells us their struggles generally don’t last very long.
But this was a tough two-game road trip for them, at a time when the Bruins really needed them to be a stabilizing force, and things don’t get much easier on Saturday when they face the 7-0-0 Panthers for the second time in four days.
Related
