For much of Saturday night’s 3-1 win over the lowly Sabres, the Bruins looked like a team that had no energy after a long road trip and was just going through the motions. A tying goal for Buffalo late in the second period put Boston in danger of becoming the team that snapped the Sabres’ lengthy losing streak, which now stands at 13 games.
Goalie Joonas Korpisalo did his part for the Bruins in the first two periods, but they needed someone to step up at the other end of the ice in the third. Enter Morgan Geekie.
Geekie was the Bruins’ best, most assertive player in the third. While many of his teammates still lagged behind, Geekie looked determined to make sure the Bruins avoided what would have been a flat-out embarrassing loss.
He scored what should have been the go-ahead goal with 12:44 to go, ripping a shot past James Reimer from distance off the rush, only to have it taken off the board after review because David Pastrnak had gone offsides. No matter. Geekie scored the actual go-ahead, game-winning goal 11 minutes later, blasting a one-timer past Reimer from the high slot with 1:45 to go. He had nearly scored on a similar one-timer just 10 seconds earlier, with both chances set up by Pastrnak, who clearly realized he owed Geekie after the earlier offsides.
It may be surprising that it was Geekie who put the Bruins on his back Saturday, but it probably shouldn’t be given the way he has been playing for the last month. After Saturday, Geekie now has six goals and three assists in his last 12 games.
It’s been a dramatic turnaround from the way Geekie started this season, which was about as poorly as possible. He went from second-line right wing on opening night to healthy scratch in just five games. He would be healthy-scratched four more times over the first month of the season. He didn’t get a point until his seventh game of the season and didn’t score a goal until his 12th.
The promise Geekie had shown in his first season in Boston, when he blew past his previous career highs with 17 goals and 39 points last year, seemed to be gone. Former Bruins coach Jim Montgomery appeared to be running out of patience as the calendar turned from October to November, yelling at Geekie in practice one day and, after another practice, answering a question about what Geekie needed to do to get on track with a curt, “Play better.”
Well, Geekie did start to play better – really in the last few games before Montgomery got fired, but then especially since interim head coach Joe Sacco took over on Nov. 19. If Geekie had been producing like this all season, he would be on pace to smash last year’s career highs again. Even with the abysmal start, this recent surge has put him just about on pace to at least match what he did last season.
And, Geekie is now sticking in the top six, playing on a line with David Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha. While some fans have been calling for Geekie to be dropped from that line on an almost daily basis, Sacco has stuck with it for the vast majority of his 15 games in charge, and for good reason.
That trio wasn’t finishing in their early games together, but they have controlled play and created chances more often than not. They have now played 185 minutes together at 5-on-5 this season, and in those minutes the Bruins have outshot opponents 99-69 (58.9%), registered an expected goals share of 59.8%, and recorded 38 high-danger chance to 22 against (63.3%).
Of course Pastrnak is the driving force of the line, and Zacha as the center is a key cog at both ends of the ice. But Geekie has a role to play as well, and Sacco believes he is getting better and better at playing it.
“I think he's obviously playing on a good line with two very good offensive players, but he's finding his niche out there right now,” Sacco said of Geekie. “He's finding some open ice, because he can shoot, and he's getting to the net-front, which I think is very important for that line. I know he scored from outside here tonight at the end of the power play, but more often in the offensive zone, that line needs someone to drive to the front of the net, and he's been doing a much better job of that for them, opening up space for the other two guys on the outside.”
Geekie acknowledges he didn’t get off to the start he wanted to or needed to this season. He wasn’t alone in that respect, but he was certainly one of the faces of underperformance, and he was the one getting taken out of the lineup all together most often.
Turning his game around wasn’t easy, but Geekie said he just had to keep believing that he was going to get better, and credited his teammates with helping him believe that.
“Just kind of knowing the kind of player I can be,” Geekie said. “It's one of those things where I felt like not a lot of things kind of went the team's way, my way. Yeah, I don't really know if I have a good answer for you. A lot of internal belief, I think, is a big one. The guys in the room were great through everything. Kind of speaks to the leadership group we have. So, I never felt on the outside looking in. Just one of those things where I tried to stay on the gas and get better every day.”
Whether Geekie can keep scoring at the rate that he has for the past month remains to be seen. Whether he’s a long-term solution on Pastrnak’s line is also a fair question. But he’s playing well and producing right now, and he’s proving that he had a lot more to give than his early-season play suggested.