BOSTON – Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy has stressed that he’s trying to keep his forward lines a little more consistent in the second half of the regular season. The results have been pretty good over the last few weeks since the Christmas break, but there are also some very real questions about how good those forward lines can be without an influx of talent from outside the organization.
That was all evident in Boston’s 3-2 overtime loss to the Montreal Canadiens on Monday night at TD Garden as Cassidy mixed, matched and switched up his forward lines to very little positive effect with the two goals scored on 43 shots. The B’s top line got a goal with Brad Marchand scoring and David Krejci struck for another goal with Tuukka Rask pulled in the final minute of the game, but otherwise it was a real futile search for goal-scoring during 5-on-5 play.
Cassidy swapped David Krejci and Jakob Forsbacka Karlsson for a time in the second period while keeping the rest of the lines intact, and then settled on a Jake DeBrusk-Krejci-Ryan Donato trio for the latter half of the game. It was all good enough to get the Bruins a point for the OT loss, but it wasn’t enough to get Boston into the winner’s circle.
“[It’s about] messages, mixing it up, trying to find [something] on a line. We’ll use [David] Krejci as an example. I think he’s played really good hockey for us this year, whoever’s been on his wings, so you don’t want to lose him if say his linemates are going well,” said Cassidy. “So we mix someone else in there.
“Then you get behind and you think well maybe you have to use more offensive-minded, say
[Ryan] Donato, who’s scored some goals, who tends to… an offensive player who when gets a chance can bury it. So, it’s a bit of the thought process in there. Then if we feel like a guy’s just not committed then that’s a message usually to a younger guy.”
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Essentially Cassidy is continuously rearranging the same forward pieces on the second and third lines, and hoping for a different result than what he’s seen in the first 40 plus games of the regular season.
Certainly some of the younger guys had their moments in Monday night’s overtime defeat. Danton Heinen and Chris Wagner both heavily pressured the puck late in the third period that caused the delay of game penalty that led to Krejci’s empty net goal. DeBrusk was part of the screen in front of Carey Price that blocked out the shot until it was too late for the Canadiens goaltender to stop it from going by him.
That was the best part of the night for DeBrusk, who very clearly struggled earlier in the game as he’s done for a couple of games now for the Bruins.
“I thought Jake had a good third period. I don’t think he was – the standard we expect out of him I don’t think has been there enough lately, period,” said Cassidy. “He’s been told that. We want him to play his way out of it. I thought in the third period there were some positives, so hopefully that gets him going into the next game. We’ll see.”
The Bruins will see about all of the young forwards like Heinen, Donato, DeBrusk and Forsbacka Karlsson that have given varying degrees of both positive and negative performances for Boston this season. The B’s started the season counting on these aforementioned young players when they built their roster at the beginning of the year, and they’re still doing just that past the midway point of the regular season.
But Cassidy and the Bruins can’t keep mixing and matching forever, so the young B’s forwards need to start seizing control of their jobs with their play if they want to keep playing key roles with the Black and Gold this season.
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