The Bruins have desperately needed at least a second line to step up and provide some offensive production all season. Recently, they have actually started to get that.
In Tuesday night's 5-4 shootout win over the Devils, Nick Ritchie, David Krejci and Craig Smith had arguably their best game as a trio yet.
During their 8:26 together at five-on-five, the Bruins out-attempted the Devils 16-2, outshot them 8-2, and outscored them 2-0.
Ritchie scored the Bruins' first goal of the game on a shot off the rush, assisted by Krejci and Smith. All three contributed to Matt Grzelcyk's game-tying goal late in the third, with Krejci winning an offensive-zone faceoff, Smith swooping in to move the loose puck back to Grzelcyk, and Ritchie setting the screen in front.
Krejci added a third assist of the game on Brad Marchand's power-play goal, while Smith also picked up a third assist with a low shot that produced a juicy rebound for Charlie McAvoy to bury.
This wasn't a one-game breakthrough either. Ritchie, Krejci and Smith are now the Bruins' second-most-used line this season behind only the top trio of Marchand, Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak, and they have been quite good across all 115 minutes of even-strength play, with the Bruins outscoring opponents 7-2 and holding a 62.5% shots share when they're on the ice.
Conor Ryan of Boston Sports Journal broke out their last four games, and the numbers are even more impressive in that span:
Needless to say, all of this is an encouraging development for the Bruins. For a team that has struggled to find any consistency or offense at all outside its top line, this is at the very least a step in the right direction, with coach Bruce Cassidy noting that it might be "coming together for them a little bit."
"They got through the neutral zone clean for the most part, so that helps. They're not turning it over. They're finding their spacing and getting through there and over the blue line and making a few plays on the rush as well," Cassidy said Tuesday night. "So, you know, maybe it's coming together for them a little bit. … We need it. We need the goal scoring, you know that. So hopefully they can build off these types of games."
If you still don't find yourself getting overly excited about any of this, there's probably a reason for that. Remember that two-thirds of this line -- Ritchie and Smith -- started this season as the wings on Boston's third line.
If they were still on the third line playing this way with Charlie Coyle, while two other wings were on the second line playing well with Krejci, you'd be much more excited. This Ritchie and this Smith could help give you a championship-caliber third line.
But even with the encouraging results with Krejci in a still relatively small but growing sample size, it's hard to buy into Ritchie-Krejci-Smith being a championship-caliber second line in the long run.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that you still don't have a third line that's scoring with anything even approaching regularity. Anders Bjork, Trent Frederic, Karson Kuhlman and Zach Senyshyn have all shown flashes playing next to Coyle at times -- with Bjork in particular picking up his play of late -- but none of the various third-line combinations have produced much offense.
Some of that is certainly on Coyle, who continues to struggle offensively with just one point in his last 12 games, but a lot of it also comes down to the fact that those wingers just aren't really ready to score at the NHL level.
Any combination of them potentially offers promise as an energetic, defensively sound fourth line that could occasionally pop one in, so this is another case of guys playing a line above where they probably should be.
Which brings us back to something we've known all season: the Bruins really need at least one more forward who can score.
Jake DeBrusk is expected to return from COVID protocol soon. Ondrej Kase continues to do some skating and could still potentially return at some point. Those were the two wings who started the season on the second line.
While it might be tempting to start to go down the road of wondering if they -- or at least DeBrusk -- could end up giving you a good third line now that you've found something with Ritchie and Smith next to Krejci, the Bruins have to know they can't count on that.
DeBrusk has struggled mightily most of this season, and the team unfortunately just doesn't know and may never know what it has in Kase. It would be folly for Don Sweeney to talk himself into or settle for sticking with this forward group as currently constituted.
Having the Ritchie-Krejci-Smith line playing effectively and scoring some goals is better than having no secondary line doing it, but it's still not nearly enough if the Bruins plan to make any sort of deep playoff run.
