Bruins first-line winger Brad Marchand has fallen into a bit of a slump as of late, and with only five games left in the regular season he is trying to get back on track before the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Let's take a look at the timeline of Marchand’s goal drought, his plan to end the season, and why it is unlikely Marchand will stay quiet in the postseason.
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Tracking Marchand’s extended goal drought
Marchand scored his last goal on March 9 in a game against the Edmonton Oilers. Since then, he has gone 13 games without a goal.
For Marchand, it’s been a long time since he’s experienced a goal drought that was this long -- dating back eight years. The current slump is his longest goal-scoring drought since he had a 15-game goal drought in 2015 at the same point late in the season.
If you want to track back to Marchand’s latest goal contribution on the power play this season, you have to go back even further -- to Jan. 18, 32 games ago. That means he has essentially gone his second half of the season without a power-play goal.
This goalless drought is uncharacteristic for Marchand, as it’s only the third time in his career he’s had a goal drought of 13 or more games. He went 20 games without one in his rookie season in 2009-10, 15 games in the 2014-15 season, and 13 games so far during this stretch.
Does Marchand need to rest, or play through his struggles?
At this time of year, just two weeks ahead of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, rest is often given to a team’s key players so they head into the postseason refreshed. Montgomery has already begun his rest rotation, taking Patrice Bergeron out of the lineup three times recently and David Krejci twice while continuing to swap his defensemen in and out of the lineup on a nightly basis. Marchand was also held out last Sunday in Carolina.
With some speculating that the slow-down in Marchand’s goal production could be due to a need for rest, he says he’d prefer to play through the final five games of the regular season to get right before the playoffs.
“I’d rather play the games and feel good going into playoffs,” Marchand told Matt Porter of the Boston Globe after Sunday’s shootout win in St. Louis. “The more games I play, it’s going to benefit me. I’ve missed enough this year.”
Marchand has missed a total of nine games, including the first seven games of the season after having labral repair surgery on both hips last May. He came back approximately a month ahead of the original six-month timeline expected for his recovery, returning to the ice on Oct. 27, exactly five months after his procedures.
Since then, Marchand has commented that he hasn’t felt fully back to form on a few occasions.
“I thought I’d feel better now than I do, to be honest with you,” Marchand said on March 8, just before the start of his current drought. “I think it’s been great, it’s been really relieving that we have the team we have and we’re as deep as we are. That definitely takes pressure off. But I thought I’d be kind of where I was last year right now, and I don’t necessarily feel like that.
“..It just gets a little frustrating when I have an expectation to play a certain way and it’s not necessarily there yet,” he added.
Will Marchand’s struggles continue into the playoffs?
Though Marchand hasn’t produced at his normal rate over the last month, it would be uncharacteristic of him to not put up better numbers once the playoffs roll around.
Marchand has been the Bruins’ leading playoff goal scorer in each of the team’s last four seasons. He has scored in more than half of the playoff games he’s been in over the past three seasons (scoring in 57.1% of games played).
Last year, he led the Bruins in playoff goals (4), assists (7) and points (11) through the team’s seven-game series with the Carolina Hurricanes.
Marchand and the Bruins will hope he’s able to rediscover his scoring touch before this year’s playoffs arrive.
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