Jim Montgomery said it was our job to figure out why the Bruins are struggling. We took our best crack at it.
On Saturday night, Jim Montgomery charged the media with figuring out why the Boston Bruins are having so much trouble after the Bruins failed to record a shot on goal throughout the entire 3rd period and overtime; one of the shortest and most succinct interviews he’s had as Bruins head coach.
Well, SCoC has a press pass. So we might as well take him up on the offer.
After all, this season has not gone nearly how anyone in Boston would’ve hoped it would so far, and while I wanted to do this at the 25 game mark like I normally would’ve, the circumstances of this team are both too compelling, concerning, and confusing to ignore.
So, let’s talk about why the Bruins are struggling. Why they seem to have a “malaise” hanging over them that’s denying them wins and valuable points.
Let’s get into it. Deep into it.
First, a look at the numbers
From the stuff that NHL.com puts on their standings page, the Boston Bruins are somehow still 3rd in the Atlantic Division with a 7-7-2 record, with 40 goals scored for, and 52 scored against. That differential is 4th-worst in the conference; beaten only by Montreal and the Pennsylvanian teams.
From an analytics perspective, it’s not any better.
Last year, when we did our mid and quarter season check-ins, the Bruins weren’t a team that controlled play much to begin with; which is fairly explainable. A post-Bergeron-and-Krejci Bruins team is a team that will struggle to control play in the way they previously had losing two titans of their center depth in such rapid succession.
The thing is; that’s fine if you can do what Coach Montgomery set them out to do in order to improve that; which was attack the net like a swarm of angry hornets after their team defense/goaltending did a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the puck going the other way to a minimum. Let quality be the salve for an absence of quantity. Let the PK and the Power Play be your weapons of war while you surrender most of the game to the other team.
This year on the other hand…that approach isn’t bearing any fruit.
The Bruins, at least early in this season, do not control play. They do not shoot enough, they do not create shots from dangerous areas of the ice, they do not create attempts from dangerous areas of the ice, and when they and they do not have the puck enough in general. This is a team-wide problem across all aspects of the forward and defense corps.
But again, that’s fine, but only if you can limit shots going the other way, right?
Well…
Not looking great!
While the loss of offense is a clear indicator of things going pear shaped, the B’s are dealing with a sudden and sharp drop in their ability to actually defend their own goaltender; the likes of which is causing their netminders’ save percentages to crater.
On top of that, their special teams appear to have experienced an absolute implosion, as their power play now sits at the very bottom of the league at 12.5% which is good for 29th overall in the league, and their penalty kill is only
So what’s contributing to all of this malaise?
Well, let’s just go through it. All of it. But we’ll start away from the forwards to talk about, to me anyway, a much bigger problem; the defense.
The Blueline is Flatlining
The defense needs a harsh wakeup call. Because the effort this year so far is frankly unacceptable for the standards the team usually sets for itself.
Hampus Lindholm, a frequent target for his down year in 2023-24 in spite of having the thankless task of dragging Brandon Carlo to respectability, has ended up The Player on defense that the B’s can count on for much of anything, as he’s otherwise been as advertised; a capable mobile defender who occasionally his warts with decision-making. Maybe not perfect, but he was the guy you wanted him to be.
His partner on the other hand…has completely cratered. In a way I cannot begin to fathom. His passing isn’t up to par, his spatial awareness in the net-front seems to have been sapped from him, and his ability to adequately defend For this team to continue to thrive; Charlie McAvoy desperately needs to improve his game.
What would help for that pairing, is anyone below these two men on the depth chart that would give them a crumb of support in these trying times.
Mason Lohrei has completely regressed to his regular season form; the bad one that a lot of people chose to forget about when the playoffs ended and currently leads the Boston Bruins in giveaways per 60 minutes of even-strength game time with 6.7. Brandon Carlo has continued his downward spiral in his own end as he would rather pass to nobody as opposed to seek a zone exit himself. Andrew Peeke while a hard worker, one of the better shot blockers in Black and Gold, and a welcome physical presence has shown to have a significant disadvantage when it comes to skating speed and has paid for that multiple times throughout the season. To round it all out while he’s had a couple of decent games, Parker Wotherspoon’s limited contributions appear to give the impression he wouldn’t be doing any better, but he’s only ever been given a select few games to actually try.
As it stands right now, it appears that a major strength of the modern Bruins has utterly collapsed in on itself from a number of players all going through struggles at once, and the goaltenders; one of whom who needs to prove he isn’t the worst player in the last two years at his position and one who has to make up for the exasperating offseason his agent put the fanbase through (and has seamlessly taken the mantle of “IT’S TUUKKA’S FAULT” as a result of the crime of Being Paid Money), can’t compensate for that in the way that they could last year.
Supernova Names, White Dwarf Performance
The big part of why this feels so frustrating is that the Bruins offense now sort of lives and dies by a very select group of players, who do not just have to score, but need to score or contribute to the score in order for the team to have a prayer of winning a game.
David Pastrnak is producing; he’s leading the team in points and goals as he probably should, and is one of two players on the entire team in double digits when it comes to points. Is he a perfect player? No. Not by a long shot, and it’s noticeable. Some might point to giveaways, an imperfect stat that he’s not even the worst offender on the team for, as a sign of a secret bad player who has always been irresponsible or unworthy of the money he’s been paid. Which certainly is a…choice.
What I think what is a much bigger problem for him is that it has become abundantly clear that he is the sole point of playdriving on his line; Zacha hasn’t been able to do it, and Lindholm is…well, we’ll get there. The result largely is that he is asked to do a much larger job that can be isolated far, far quicker than he has been in the past, and as a result he has struggled to look as truly dominant as previous seasons. According to Czech writers at NHL.com; it may be because of a nagging injury, which would only compound the issue. He’s struggling because he has to be the playmaker for multiple other players, and he’s doing it while in pain the entire time. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating, just something we can now point to as a clear reason this otherwise perfectly excellent winger would be struggling.
Besides, that’s playing smokescreen for the player who’s start to the season was damn near nightmarish: Brad Marchand.
Marchand’s difficulties in creating offense this year are not just frustrating, they’re a little scary given the letter he now carries on his chest and what that means. It has been a good long time since his decision-making has been actively under question for something involving hockey, but man if he hasn’t earned it. His body and mind seem to be actively at odds with one another, and while he has shown the playmaking acumen he’s otherwise had, he has still been just as much the head of a lot of the Bruins’ boneheaded moments.
This has manifested itself in the box score and in the analytics; while Pasta and Marchand are still points and goals leaders on the team, their shooting-percentages are at all time lows, and their on-ice impact as a result has dropped considerably; with Marchand and Pasta sitting somewhere around 8th or 9th on the team in most of the important stuff; well below players like Matthew Poitras and Justin Brazeau, who have been unambiguous positives in terms of 5v5 impact not just from the raw percentages, but from the per-60 rates as well. Both of these players fit as examples because while the results have not yet come, the impact far outshines both of the Bruins’ two most important forwards.
All that leads up to two players who feel like they’ve taken a noticeable step backwards, and in spite of their place on the stat sheet leaders…they need to be better.
4th Line Phenoms and Top 9 Pretenders
The interesting development of the early season is that the Bruins have sort of stumbled into an excellent line by complete and total accident.
The 4th Line of the Bruins has held a sort of special place of honor for years since the Merlot Line of 2011, and it should do them proud to know the idea of a great fourth line continues the tradition of an exceptional in a huge way: Mark Kastelic is an genuine revelation, Johnny Beecher has had his ups and downs but has improved significantly into a responsible, physical threat, and Cole Koepke has been an honest-to-god points-getting machine! I am genuinely happy for all three of these guys and am glad that they give me something positive to take from just about each game! Koepke for 48 hours or so was even the B’s leader in points! They have been an unambiguous positive!
The thing is this: if your 4th Line is the best line you have game in, game out? That should be a klaxons blaring, sirens alarms and bells ringing nightmare for the other players ahead of them in the lineup. That multiple long-time players who are making twice these players’ current salaries are getting outpaced in scoring by a bunch of guys who are playing 12 minutes a night is not tenable. At all.
Frankly, given how the season has gone so far; that fact should be hanging over the skaters’ heads like an axe. So far, it’s only really extended it’s blade to obviously negative cases like Max Jones, Riley Tufte, and Morgan Geekie. It should start hanging over more than a couple of the players making far, far more than they do.
Buyers…Something
Part of that problem is that the Bruins knew well ahead of time that they would need to improve at Center and at D while also competing every year and also trading most of their firsts and finishing no higher in the standings than about 14th or 15th place over the last few years. Kind of a hard needle to thread.
So, in their desire to improve at the faceoff dot, they went and got Elias Lindholm coming out of strong years with the Flames and Canucks. This was a gamble; while he’s been a capable 1C just about everywhere he’s been, he’s also notable for having been a pretty mediocre player in terms of on-ice impact that has gone a long, long time since his last possession-positive season, and has been used largely as a complimentary piece for world-class wingers.
So what have they gotten? A quantum hockey player.
I have never seen a player who goes from irreplaceable to the effort in front of him to replacement level between games. Go check! I’ll give you the link to the games! Each game so far he’s ping-ponged between above 50% in shooting metrics, or well below; with extremely inconsistent results.
What has that wrought in terms of results?
9 points. 3rd on the team in such a stat, and most of it from assists.
I was wondering if we were going to see the “Bruins Bump” fix Elias Lindholm, or if it was just too much, and the Bruins would be left with a player who would have to justify a long contract. Early returns however suggests that the Forward Lindholm has been a decent winner of faceoffs, and a reasonably consistent assist-producer; even if he pendulum swings between acceptable levels of on-ice play on a whim, and is currently being outscored by multiple 4th liners making a quarter of his salary.
In essence, we’ve gotten both the disappointing player, and also the useful player.
On defense, Nikita Zadorov was brought in. Zadorov by all accounts has been perfectly fine; been as advertised for the most part. In fact, through the first ten games he’s usually been one of the better drivers of play so far. The issue he faces is that he simply cannot stop taking penalties. Are they avoidable? I’d say a good number of them have been! Is it referee disdain? Is it poor discipline? Both of these things, thanks to the way that NHL Refereeing tends to be, could be entirely true! With the Bruins defense and more importantly, it’s penalty kill being in such dire strats, that only compounds the issues they’ve been facing with a largely correctable series of errors that smears the positives he’s been able to accrue.
Because of the extenuating circumstances revolving around these two, I think it’s understandable to be feeling a little bit of buyers remorse…but their warts are both so unique and so tied into the rest of the team’s issues, it feels like it could work itself out?
It just adds to the frustration by the end of it, which is what makes things worse.
Skipper Skepticism
A lot of this currently lies at the feet of Jim Montgomery, for better or worse.
It’s a natural response; when the players start to play badly, blame should go to the man who told them to play that way. Discipline has been a major issue this year with the Bruins being one of the most penalized teams in the league, and the coach should be the one to address that. Three out of the four lines are playing miserably, so he should be held to account for that. There doesn’t seem to be any chemistry, so he should try and fix that. All of that seems pretty reasonable.
Thing is…he’s been pretty clear with the media that what’s going on in front of him is not what he wants out of this team. He’s yelled at leaders on the bench, held post-period meetings, and been very clear that this is not what he expects out of this team. He’s had practices after bad games and cancelled practices after bad games. He’s line mixed. And he’s line mixed. And he’s line mixed.
Oh how he’s line mixed.
One might even say this is the defining trait of Jim Montgomery’s time as a Boston Bruins’ head coach: the reported lines are only the actual lines when the team is doing everything right. With the offense of the team being so anemic, and it’s defense being so haphazard, it feels like a natural place to assign blame.
Jim Montgomery’s time as Boston Bruins head coach has been dealing with the slow rot of the rest of the team as offense was slowly but surely bled from the lineup in order to keep that identity that the team has. To stave off this problem, he has looked for the individual boosts that come from unusual pairings and chemistries that come from giving different looks to the other team. They might get an all heavy line, the 4th line. an all defense line, and then get thrown a curveball with Justin Brazeau and David Pastrnak playing together. His job has been to draw blood from a rapidly calcifying roster, and unfortunately now it’s looking like all he has left to work with is statues who either are playing too tight, too loose, too fast, too slow, or all of the above in one horrible mish-mash of trying so very hard not to screw up.
No amount of line blending is going to fix a bunch of individual ingredients playing their worst hockey, and I think he knows it. He knows something is wrong, and whether it be players faltering in the system or a failure to communicate it, I do believe he’s trying his damnedest to fix it. You can see it in his press conferences, and how he reacts to the team during play. He is clearly irked by what’s happening out there and wants it to change.
The question of course…is whether or not he can actually do that.
So, the hope is that the team can light a fire under the players by firing Monty. After all, many fans have pointed to the 2000-01 Boston Bruins as an example of a team that played much better after a coach firing sparked the team to play better. Given how the team seems to be running out of options that don’t immediately point to the people who built the team he’s coaching being the culprits for all of this and should bear responsibility, it’s not the worst idea in the world; the New Coach Bump might even right the ship altogether!
However, one could also make the point that those same 2000-01 Bruins still failed to make the playoffs after that bump even with their improvement in play, and were actually improved by a massive offseason focus on spending for offense and taking risks to do so.
The risks of what happens next after that might be more of a distraction than you might think.
Big for what?
Admittedly, this is an eye-test thing. The analytics don’t really care how you get the puck, they just care that you have it at all and can re-acquire it when you let a shot loose. The effort towards playing good hockey usually gets rewarded by being possession-positive, and you can do that however you feel works best. For Boston this year, there are extremely few players who can say they’re doing that, and one place fans have placed blame is in the fact that the Bruins picked them because they’re big.
The Boston Bruins are Big, and they are playing very badly.
But the discussion point of the team overemphasizing size over skill or speed is one that has taken off throughout the Bruins fan-o-sphere, and only gets worse with each passing game where it looks like they’re playing in slow motion.
Here’s the thing: everybody on the Boston Bruins this year is big. Just about everybody on the Bruins with very noteworthy exceptions was big last year. They didn’t actually have to do all that much to get to the top of the NHL’s pile. Being the biggest, heaviest team in the league was effectively destiny.
While it’s easy to make this about an organizational (and let’s be real; fanbase’s) size fetish, I sure was tempted to do that given how poorly at least some of the signings have panned out…I am not 100% sure size and size alone is the issue. If I had to apply it to what’s going on here? The issue is that the Bruins’ size creates…nothing. It is applied for no benefit.
There is a complete lack of creativity in the opponents end, the competing for nothing, the inability to establish and re-establish possession outside of a very select few skaters in board battles and in net-front scrambles. Second chance bounces bobble away harmlessly. The opportunity in front of the net and in the middle of the ice is not seized from their ability to play the body.
They are playing as big guys with nothing to offer. They are Six-foot-something space fillers with the occasional goal scoring being done by fourth liners and David Pastrnak.
The funny Toronto clown referred to these kinds of players as “Cardio Merchants”. I have an inkling that more than a couple of players on the Bruins tend to fall into that category when they aren’t having an A++ game where they directly contribute to the score.
Perhaps the problem they keep running into with trying to build a team with that kind of composition is that, increasingly, teams really don’t care how physically big you think you are. Sure, you can mash ‘em all you like against the boards. They’re just gonna get right back up and continue the play because that’s what’s expected of them. They are largely finely tuned instruments of hockey, and have been so for decades at this point. A good number of them are more than used to getting hit real hard four or five times a game if they’re lucky. You have to make those hits count; make sure your teammates are ready to get the puck after you’ve laid the hit. Each use of physicality is a risk in and of itself, and it needs to be calculated correctly in order to not take yourself immediately out of the play in an NHL where it will not be the ender of plays on it’s own.
Right now, a lot of the top 9 can’t do that. Hence, why a lot of people will blame the acquisition of size as a problem; nobody the fans are watching seems to knows or wants to know how to apply it, and as such they can’t dictate the pace.
I don’t know if it’s the problem, but it certainly doesn’t help the aesthetics of watching this team struggle.
So, what does all of this add up to?
What we have seen so far consists largely of a team that cannot rely in the offensive might of it’s star players to bail out the rest of it’s shooting inadequacies as they too are having those inadequacies, and has significant issues with keeping up the pace across multiple games, and it’s usual defensive strengths have actively fallen apart.
The reasons for this are both free agent acquisitions having their warts that have yet to be smoothed out, multiple players who were expected to take major steps forward as leaders both on and off ice not having done so, and special teams that seem completely and utterly broken, only beaten by fellow Eastern Conference squads who seem to be having catastrophically worse seasons.
All of that is still somehow third place in the Atlantic Division as of this writing.
Is there any good news?
Yeah. It’s still early.
It bears repeating, but October and November hockey is almost never an arbiter of the rest of the season unless you are absolutely cooked out of the gate. I mean, just look at these standings!
The Atlantic is a car crash of teams that are somewhere between decent and terrible, and right now they’re in third. Not by much, but somehow, that chaos is still working for them.
Indeed, everything we’re seeing right now in the league, from the Jets’ preposterous start to the season to the complete implosion of the Predators to the sudden surge of the Sharks; is largely complete noise and heavily distorted by score effects and teams adjusting to this year’s NHL as it unfolds around them. This means that what we see before us could swing violently back towards being normal without warning, and we’ll completely forget about whatever it is we’re seeing now in the Bruins. Even with how absolutely agonizing the team is playing, they are, for the most part, improving at the important stuff.
That said…improvement does need to start showing it’s face as tangible results in the coming weeks.
While their November schedule isn’t exactly loaded with huge tests, there are plenty of teams that the B’s, with the roster they have, should be able to beat. With only very notable exceptions like Dallas, November could theoretically pick up some all-important points in to start to put this bad start behind them for good.
In order to do that, the Bruins need to hit their next nine games on all cylinders, or risk being on the outside looking in by American Thanksgiving. A very bad place to be.
There’s potential for this team to do it.
They’re gonna need to dig deep to do so.