In a contest featuring four of the NHL’s top five point scorers, you would think offense would be on full display Saturday afternoon at TD Garden.
Offense wasn’t a problem for the Oilers who got a goal from Connor McDavid and a goal and assist from Leon Draisaitl.
The two are tied for the league lead in points with 65.
The Bruins got off to an early start as David Pastrnak’s league leading 31st goal 3:10 into the game gave the Bruins an early 1-0 lead. His 61st first point of the season, good for fourth in the league.
The power play goal assisted by Brad Marchand, his fifth best 60th point of the season.
But unfortunately for the Bruins, they couldn’t match the Oilers star power, dropping their third straight game, 4-1.
“I don’t think we attacked the net enough,” said head coach Bruce Cassidy. “So that was lack, I think, of o-zone possession time. I think they have some high-end skill that if you let them skate, let their [defense] join, they’ll start turning the tide, and that’s what they did,”
Saturday was the second game in a row where Pastrnak opened the scoring for the Bruins, but couldn’t muster anymore offense.
“I think right now we know the goals aren’t coming easily, so you know it’s gonna be, every goal matters,” Cassidy added. “So, I think that’s in everybody’s head. It’s just the stretch we’re in right now.”
Lack of secondary scoring, and I guess scoring in general, is becoming more a frustrating problem then it was a few weeks ago.
In Saturday’s loss, with the exception of Brandon Carlo, each Bruin had at least one shot on goal.
Pastrnak and Sean Kuraly had five a piece.
“We’ve just got to believe in each other. We know we’ve got a good team. We know we can come back in any game in the third period if we’re down,” said David Krejci who has just three goals in his last 15 games. “But we’re just kind of in the middle of it now, so just keep your head, keep working hard and things will eventually turn the other way.”
As nice as it was to see nearly every Bruin put a puck on net—36 shots in total— as Cassidy mentioned, there was no net front presence, and not many shots from high-danger scoring areas.
An offensive attack that lacked much danger.
It was an effort where the Bruins couldn’t muster any momentum from shift-to-shift. They weren’t explosive enough and made it an easy day at the office for Oilers goalie Mike Smith.
As the Bruins go through their scoring slump, and look to break out of their three game losing streak, Patrice Bergeron knows they get frustrated and it's a matter of getting back to basics.
“It’s about rolling up your sleeves and getting to the net. I think there’s a lot of fancy plays that we can get rid of in our game and get back to funneling the puck and knowing we’re going there,” Bergeron said.
“There were a lot of loose pucks that were there that we can find, and find some urgency to get them and bear down on those goals. It’s not always going to be pretty and that’s what we need to rely on right now.”
It’s going to be up to the guys in the Bruins room to figure this out, start putting pucks in the net and work on turning things around.
A shakeup is needed, and no, I’m not talking about a major trade, or even bringing in a body or two from Providence.
Maybe it’s time to break up the Marchand, Bergeron and Pastrnak trio. Even if it’s for a game or two, or until the Bruins can break the dam and start scoring goals again.
Cassidy took a step towards that late in the game Saturday putting Charlie Coyle with Bergeron and Marchand, while Anders Bjork and Danton Heinen were centered by Krejci.
Part of that shakeup came from the lack of production from Jake DeBrusk, Krejci and Coyle.
“That’s clearly a group of players that, it doesn’t matter who they’re with, we need to see a little bit more attack out of them,” said Cassidy. “Some nights it goes in, you go through stretches — everything goes in, something doesn’t — but I just think they’ve been too quiet for how good they are. And I don’t have a great answer for what the reason is.”
Even though they couldn’t produce anything offensively there was some traction behind the Marchand, Bergeron and Coyle trio in the 3:51 of five-on-five ice time they saw together.
The reworked top line had four shots on goal, two scoring chances and won the Corsi battle 8-2 in their 3:51 together.
It was a small sample size, but an interesting one at that. With 10 goals in their last five games, something has to change.
It sounds like some of those line combinations we saw Saturday could be that change .
“We’ll take a look at it after, to be honest with you. Coyle went up, he had never played
with Bergy [Bergeron] and March [Marchand], so that was something we’d always said, ‘Well, I wonder what that would look like,’” said Cassidy.
“Krejci and Pasta [Pastrnak] we’ve seen, Heino’s [Heinen] been there. We’ll take a closer look at it, see what was generated. This is a very small sample size, so I don’t know how much we’ll use from it.”
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