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The Boston Bruins have operated with a ‘next man up’ mindset for quite a while now.
But it’s almost impossible to replace
David Krejci (upper-body, placed on injured reserve on Tuesday). And now the Bruins will try to replace yet another irreplaceable, as the team will be without
Brad Marchand for tomorrow’s Winter Classic against the Montreal Canadiens at Gillette Stadium thanks to his three-game ban for clipping Ottawa’s Mark Borowiecki on Tuesday night.
The absence of both have put coach
Claude Julien in a line-juggling situation that’s put
Loui Eriksson and
Seth Griffith on Boston’s first line,
Brett Connolly with Ryan Spooner and winger Matt Beleskey, and Alex Khokhlachev back up from Providence and on a Boston third line with Frank Vatrano and center Landon Ferraro. Oh, and to make all of this work from a roster standpoint, the Bruins have sent defenseman Colin Miller, the only non-waiver eligible defenseman on their NHL roster, down to the Providence Bruins of the American Hockey League.
The body-shuffling throughout the 12-man forward corp isn’t shocking to the B’s at this point in the year, but the loss of Marchand, the team’s leading goal-scorer, is an undeniably big one.
“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Boston center
Patrice Bergeron admitted of playing without Marchand, the go-to winger to his left in just about anything situational imaginable since 2011, in tomorrow’s tilt. “We just have to go out there and play our game. That’s what the message was today is just whatever you bring, just go out there and do it. Sometimes it is a bit of an adaptation and adjustment, but at the end of the day I played with Loui before, and I know kind of his tendencies. And Seth [Griffith] is a smart player. He knows where to position himself on the ice, so, it’s got the potential to be a good line, and we just have to go out there and play our game.”
The 5-foot-9 Marchand remained adamant that he had no ill intent when it came to his collision with Borowiecki, but took the responsibility of putting his teammates in a difficult position when it comes to the preparation for the Winter Classic. With the fourth suspension of his NHL career now official, Julien is operating with what he can as the team gets set for tomorrow’s puck drop in front of 68,000.
“You control what you can control,” said Julien. Right now we’ve brought somebody else in. I’m going to play with the guys I have and our team needs to be a team. We need to just play the way we have through all these situations and that’s all we can do right now. So as a coach, I don’t bog myself down with these things and I just move forward with what I’ve got. And I’ve said that forever. I’m going to work with the players I have in front of me and try to get the most out of them.
“That’s what I’m going to do here moving forward.”
Marchand’s departure means a promotion for a guy like Connolly, something he embraces.
“We got a lot of guys in here that can step up, you saw that last game. You just gotta play it by committee, good teams find a way to win when your players go down and we’ve lost two good ones. It’s just a matter of guys stepping up,” Connolly said after the team’s practice today. “There’s gonna be guys playing different roles and it’s another chance for guys to obviously step up and get a big win. It’s a big two points and we’re going to need not just a couple of players, but everyone to step up and fill the void for [David Krejci] and [Brad Marchand]. It’s a tough task. But a very doable task.”
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Boston Chapter of the Pro Hockey Writers Association since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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