Boston Bruins
A dormant power play and major regression from both Morgan Geekie and Elias Lindholm has hindered Boston’s playoff push.
At face value, the Bruins closing out a three-game road trip with four out of a possible six points would seemingly be a welcome development for Marco Sturm’s club.
After all, Boston entered this trek with seven straight losses away from TD Garden.
But the Bruins also return to Boston having squandered a prime opportunity to capture six of six points — dropping back-to-back games in overtime to the Devils and Canadiens on Monday and Tuesday.
Both defeats doled out over the span of 24 hours featured Boston giving up the game-winning tally with under 30 seconds to go in the extra frame — with Cole Caufield sealing a 3-2 Habs win with just 22 seconds to go in OT at the Bell Centre.
With just 14 games left in the regular season, the Bruins currently sit in the top wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference — just ahead of the Red Wings by virtue of having one more regulation win (27).
But the red-hot Blue Jackets sit one point (81) behind both the Bruins and Red Wings — with a game in hand.
The Bruins don’t have a whole lot of breathing room for this stretch run, with several lingering issues continuing to hamper a roster that has yet to find traction since returning from the Olympic break.
Here are three things that Boston needs to correct if this team wants to punch a ticket to the playoffs:
A dormant power play
Even with Pavel Zacha lighting the lamp on the man advantage Tuesday, the Bruins’ power play has gone from a consistent avenue of offense into a momentum-sapping mechanism in record time.
Since then they are 28th in the league with just a 12.8 percent success rate — scoring five tallies off of 39 attempts.
Zacha’s goal notwithstanding, it was far from a banner night for Boston’s power play up in Quebec.
Before Zacha backhanded a ricocheting puck past Habs goalie Jakub Dobes, more disjointed passing from Boston’s top playmakers nearly led to a Montreal shorthanded tally — with Jeremy Swayman turning aside a breakaway bid from Josh Anderson.
The rest of Tuesday’s contest featured more of the same from a stagnant power play — with poor passing and a stubborn approach on entries giving Boston little time to manufacture quality chances in the offensive zone.
In 7:57 of power-play ice time against Montreal, the Bruins attempted just 10 shots — and only generated three high-danger scoring chances.
Be it reshuffling the personnel on the top unit or simplifying their approach on zone entries, Bruins assistant coach Steve Spott needs to make a few tweaks to get Boston’s power play humming once again.
No-shows on the third line
The “kid line” of Fraser Minten, Marat Khusnutdinov, and noted youngster David Pastrnak helped generate two 5-on-5 tallies on Monday in Newark.
Boston’s second line of Zacha, Viktor Arvidsson, and Casey Mittelstadt — as they’ve seemingly done all season — did a lot of the heavy lifting in the offensive zone on Tuesday against Montreal.
In a perfect world, it’d be a positive sign for the Bruins’ scoring depth that a 34-goal scorer in Morgan Geekie and a former top-line pivot in Elias Lindholm have been relegated to the third line this month.
Instead, that segment of Sturm’s forward corps has withered away into a figurative no-man’s land — generating few positives down both ends of the frozen sheet for a Bruins team in desperate need of a lift.
Following Tuesday’s loss, the Bruins have now played 11 games since the NHL resumed action after the Winter Olympics. Over that stretch, both Lindholm and Geekie have generated zero points at 5-on-5 play. Zero.
It’s been downright dour for two forwards who played a hefty part in Boston’s success for most of the first four-plus months of this season.
Over this same 11-game stretch, both Lindholm and Geekie have been on the ice together for 64:16 of 5-on-5 ice time. During those reps, the Bruins have been outscored, 4-0, while that duo’s slump has also factored heavily into Boston’s sputtering power play.
Sturm might have to reshuffle his lines once again and bump Geekie back up to a reworked top line with Pastrnak and Minten to get Boston’s top trigger-man rolling once again.
Otherwise, the Bruins will have to wait until James Hagens’ season at Boston College wraps if they want to give this forward grouping another jolt.
Question marks on the third D pair
Andrew Peeke might have saved a goal in the waning minutes of the third period by corralling a puck near the crease against several prodding Montreal sticks.
Still, it was far from the sharpest night for the veteran defenseman — as he was out on the ice for both of Montreal’s two tallies in regulation play.
Sturm has continued to slot Peeke in and out of the lineup since the NHL resumed play in late February — often swapping him with Henri Jokiharju as Boston’s right-shot option on the third defensive pairing.
While Peeke labored this season when paired with Hampus Lindholm (Boston outscored, 21-8, in their 339 minutes of 5-on-5 reps), the numbers haven’t been much better for a duo of Peeke and Nikita Zadorov as of late.
Since the Bruins returned from the Milano-Cortina games, a Zadorov-Peeke pairing has been outscored, 4-2, in 96:01 of 5-on-5 reps.
Sturm might have to make the call and stick with one of Peeke or Jokiharju for this stretch run, rather than continue this current carousel of blueliners next to Zadorov.
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