If you thought we may have been running out of things to praise Charlie McAvoy for this series, that’s understandable.
After a Game 2 in which McAvoy was a plus-4 in a 4-3 overtime win for the Bruins, his coach, Bruce Cassidy, marveled at how many minutes McAvoy was able to play late in the game and wondered if he had “extra large lungs.”
The next day, no less an expert on great defense than Ray Bourque appeared on The Greg Hill Show and said McAvoy has “got it all” and that “it’s just a matter of time before you see Charlie being one of the Norris contenders year in, year out.”
But Friday night’s Game 4 gave us something else to praise McAvoy for, and it’s the one thing that’s been used against him when it comes to that Norris conversation: offensive production, specifically on the power play.
McAvoy had three assists in a 4-1 Boston win, all on the power play. He now has five assists -- all on the power play -- in the series, making him the highest-scoring player in the series and the second-highest scoring defenseman in the playoffs behind only Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman.
McAvoy has always been a good offensive player. It is far from a weakness. But when it comes to something like the Norris debate, players who aren’t among the highest-scoring defensemen in the league generally get passed over. McAvoy ranked 25th with 30 points (5 goals, 25 assists) in the regular season.
A lot of the players ahead of him do a lot of their offensive damage on the power play. McAvoy was rarely used on the Bruins’ top power-play unit in the past because they had Torey Krug, one of the best power-play quarterbacks in the league, entrenched ahead of him.
For much of this season, there’s been some mixing and matching as the Bruins have tried to find the right lineup for their top power-play unit. Sometimes it’s been McAvoy as the quarterback. More often it was Matt Grzelcyk. Mike Reilly got a look there for a couple games. Cassidy even tested a five-forward unit at one point.
McAvoy finished the regular season with eight power-play points -- a career high for him, but well behind guys like Hedman, Adam Fox, Cale Makar and John Carlson, who were all in the 15-25 range.
But just as McAvoy has worked to get better in pretty much every other aspect of his game, he kept working to get better on the power play, too. The Bruins are really starting to see the fruits of that labor in this first-round series.
After Boston’s Game 1 loss, Cassidy decided to change up his top unit, moving McAvoy and David Krejci up from the second unit to play with David Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand, while dropping down Grzelcyk and Nick Ritchie.
The thinking was that with some of the Bruins’ usual go-to power-play setups getting taken away, four right shots would create some different looks, particularly in the form of multiple one-timer options for passes coming from the right side of the ice.
That was how the Bruins got the tying goal in the third period of Game 3, with McAvoy rotating down the right side and feeding Bergeron in the bumper spot for a shot attempt that bounced around before Marchand batted it in out of mid-air.
In Game 4, all three of McAvoy’s assists came on a little different look, with him at center point feeding players to his right. The first two saw him leading Pastrnak -- on the right side instead of his usual left -- into open shooting space. The third saw him perfectly set up Grzelcyk for a one-timer.
After starting the series 1-for-6 on the power play, the Bruins are now 4-for-10 over the last two games, with McAvoy assisting on all four goals.
“Those are things he just has to work on getting better at. He has. He’s done a nice job,” Cassidy said of McAvoy’s improvement on the power play. “I think the most important thing for Charlie is understanding what the role is up top there, who you’re out with, how much you need to do, how much you’re a facilitator, how much you need to drive it, and when to shoot and when to dish. Some of that is just instincts. He has good instincts.
“When he first got here, I thought he was more of a guy who wanted to move north-south up top, and it’s more of an east-west role. You’re the only guy up there, so you’re moving between the dots a lot as opposed to going down the half wall. So that’s an adjustment he had to make. He’s very good going straight down the wall. We’ve seen it on faceoff plays. On that particular power play, it’s more open your hips and move each way. That’s something he’s really worked hard on and wants to get better at, and has.”
Add McAvoy’s power-play production to his five-on-five dominance (the Bruins are outscoring the Capitals 4-1 and out-shooting them 58-37 when McAvoy is on the ice at five-on-five, per Natural Stat Trick) and penalty-killing (he leads all players in PK minutes in the series and has helped limit Washington’s dangerous power play to a 3-for-17 showing in the series), and you get a player who, as Bourque said, has “got it all” -- or, as his teammate and D partner Grzelcyk put it, is “one of the best defensemen in the league.”
“Unbelievable. I can’t say enough good things about him,” Grzelcyk said of McAvoy Friday night. “Obviously I got to play with him in college [at Boston University], and you could see from an early age that he’s a special player. He’s only gotten better and better each year. The biggest thing about him is when the spotlight’s on him and the lights get brighter, Chucky shows up to play and elevates his game. … It’s fun to watch him grow up kind of right in front of our eyes. He’s one of the best defensemen in the league.”
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