One game isn’t that unexpected. Two games isn’t fully a trend. But three? That’s officially the start of a slump.
Thankfully for the Boston Bruins, they’re not slumping courtesy of Morgan Geekie‘s game-tying goal seconds before the end of regulation and Elias Lindholm‘s game-winning goal in overtime as the Bruins came from behind to defeat the Chicago Blackhawks, 5-4, Saturday afternoon at TD Garden.
Boston went 9-4-1 in October after their perfect 1-0-0 in September and are now 10-4-1 overall with 21 points on the season.
Lindholm now has eight points (four goals, four assists) in his last eight games.
It was a sloppy effort all-around, but resiliency is an important factor in hockey.
Despite allowing four goals in the effort, Michael DiPietro was peppered with 41 shots against. He stayed in the fight all afternoon and sprawled out to make a save while attempting a poke check on Anton Frondell‘s breakway bid for a hat trick.
Had DiPietro’s confidence been affected by anything earlier in the game, Frondell would’ve been walking out of TD Garden feeling elated. Instead, DiPietro is dialed in.
He has three wins, as well as a 2.00 goals-against average and a .938 save percentage in his last three games. He also has a shutout in that span.
Sure, Saturday’s win came with four goals against, but DiPietro is one of the best backups in the league currently. He’s 3-1-0 overall with a 2.26 GAA and a .929 SV%.
In the meantime, Saturday’s victory also secured five consecutive wins on home ice for Boston.
Marco Sturm made two lineup changes between Thursday night’s loss in St. Louis and Saturday’s matinée matchup with Chicago, replacing Matthew Poitras on the fourth line with Sean Kuraly and Connor Clifton on the third defensive pairing with Jonathan Aspirot.
Both Poitras and Clifton were healthy scratches.
I’d have to imagine the lineup moves were more about getting reps than any sort of indication of poor performance or poor standing with the coaching staff on Poitras’ behalf, at least.
It’s not ideal to remove one of your better, faster forwards on the fourth line, but it’s understandable that a fourth line player gets swapped with a fourth line player for a game.
Entering Saturday, Kuraly had a 67.6 faceoff win percentage in four games this season.
He’s now up to a 69.0 FOW% in five games, while Mark Kastelic– who has also taken quite a few faceoffs on the fourth line when either Kuraly or Poitras is playing– went from a 61.4 FOW% in 14 games entering the afternoon to a 60.3 FOW% after Saturday’s effort.
Poitras currently has a 59.4 FOW% in 11 games played.
Kuraly (69.0) leads the team in faceoff win percentage, though Kastelic (60.3) leads among the regulars with Lindholm (60.2), Poitras (59.4), Pavel Zacha (54.7), James Hagens (50.0), Fraser Minten (46.3), Geekie (45.7), Tanner Jeannot (45.0) and Marat Khusnutdinov (38.9) rounding out the top-10 on the entire roster.
Late in the middle frame, Kuraly and Kastelic had a great shift on the penalty kill. If Kuraly is a depth forward nowadays, Saturday’s showing in 8:45 time on ice was what you need him to do in a pinch.
We spend far too much time arguing about bottom-six forwards and third pairing defenders on hockey Twitter. One occasional appearance early in the regular season is not worth fussing about.
At the same time, it wasn’t a great afternoon for the Aspirot-Lohrei pairing.
It’s hard to build chemistry on-the-fly, even if Aspirot and Mason Lohrei spent a good chunk playing together last season, but it’s a new season. These things can happen.
It also doesn’t help if one player (Aspirot) hasn’t played much this year to begin with in terms of establishing a baseline. That said, two things can be true– Aspirot is a depth defender on this roster and Lohrei can be a candidate for being the next healthy scratch.
Well, the latter part would’ve been true if Lohrei didn’t end up turning things around later in the game– scoring his third goal of the season in the process.
Nevertheless, the good news is that if you follow my “observation game (or two)” logic, then you should expect Frédéric Brunet to be back in the lineup Monday night against the Vegas Golden Knights.
Crisis averted.
Whether or not Aspirot or Clifton get another game if Lohrei is to be scratched remains to be seen.
Crisis back on?
File this in the “needs improvement” dept.
Penalty kill woes continue to haunt the Bruins.
You may look at the scoresheet and say “but Chicago’s power play was only 1/3 on the afternoon?” Yes, but prior to Saturday in Boston, the Blackhawks hadn’t scored a road power-play goal so far this season.
That and there’s this observation from Conor Ryan of The Boston Globe— that St. Louis’ two power-play goals in Thursday’s loss for the Bruins were scored four and six seconds into the power play for the Blues. Chicago only needed 11 seconds to score on their first power play opportunity of the afternoon Saturday.
Sure, that’s an improvement by about double the time it took Boston’s penalty kill to allow a goal against, but it’s still a goal against in a “that’s way too soon to give up a power-play goal while shorthanded” sense.
There’s effective power plays that wear down their opponents and then there’s giving up before things even get started and right now the Bruins need to find a way to avoid the latter.
Now for the positives:
David Pastrňák scored a goal midway through the first period to tie things up, 1-1.
It was the 428th career goal for Pastrňák– passing Patrice Bergeron for sole-possession of the third-most goals in Bruins history in the process.
If the last couple of games needed more production from Boston’s top-six forward group, Pastrňák and Geekie heard the call as each had a pair of goals in Saturday’s win. Geekie’s goal was just his second of the season.
Players go on hot streaks and cold streaks throughout the season. It’s when an entire line or majority of the top-six goes cold for multiple games at a time that’s troubling.
Though he didn’t have a goal in the game, JJ Peterka, had a pair of assists and tied Pastrňák for the most shots on goal among the Bruins with four each.
Despite Chicago badly outshooting Boston, 28-13, through 40 minutes, the B’s managed to amass 17 shots on net– the most they’ve had in any period so far this season– in the final frame of regulation to the Blackhawks’ 10.
Chicago still finished with a 41-32 advantage by the end of the afternoon, however.
Oh and Elias Lindholm’s overtime-winning goal looked cool as hell.
Sick hands like that, even Peter Forsberg has to nod approval out of respect.
Finally, whatever this is
“What if the Bruins traded Pavel Zacha, Dean Letourneau, Will Zellers, Matt Poitras and a first round pick for Nikita Kucherov?”
One thing’s for sure, you’re definitely not eating Halloween candy before saying these kinds of things. You should lay off of whatever you’ve been getting into.
Then again, with the way Nikita Zadorov has been disciplined by Sturm for his undisciplined actions this season and in light of the fact that Zadorov and Kucherov share the same agent (Dan Milstein) what are the odds Boston could trade Zadorov for Kucherov one-for-one? I’ll hang up and listen.
After all, the Tampa Bay Lightning are going to have to do something on defense sometime with Victor Hedman, John Carlson and Ryan McDonagh being 35, 36 and 37-years-old, respectively. O.K., I’ll hang up for real this time.
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