In the immediate aftermath, there was plenty of anger to go around.
In the Bruins’ locker room, most of the frustration was focused on the play in particular out on the ice — a painful sequence that ended with Matt Grzelcyk crumpled on the ice in pain.
With just 2:03 remaining in the first period of Wednesday’s Game 2 against the Blues, a simple puck retrieval behind Boston’s net quickly turned hazardous for Grzelcyk. Off balance as he slowed up along the end boards, the B’s defenseman was struck from behind by St. Louis skater Oskar Sundqvist — with the latter’s elbow slamming Grzelcyk’s face into the glass.
The Charlestown native immediately dropped to the ice, eventually needing assistance from David Krejci and Jake DeBrusk before exiting the Cup Final contest for good.
For David Backes, the hit delivered by Sundqvist, tabbed by the on-ice officials as two minutes for boarding, should bring more severe consequences for the Blues, especially given the end result — with Grzelcyk sent to the hospital for further testing.
For
Bruce Cassidy
, most of the anger revolved around the minutes following Grzelcyk’s exit.
Gifted with another stint on the man advantage after
Charlie Coyle
made the Blues pay earlier in the stanza off of a goaltender interference call, Boston’s power play failed to avenge its fallen defenseman — with a wrist shot from Coyle standing as the lone jab that Boston was able to land against
Jordan Binnington
in net.
Without Grzelcyk’s ability to serve as a Swiss Army Knife when it comes to balancing TOI workloads among the rest of the D corps, Cassidy and his staff were forced to double-shift
Torey Krug
during power-play reps (6:02 PP TOI), while both
Zdeno Chara
(3:20 SH TOI)
and
Brandon Carlo
(3:18 TOI)
didn’t receive much of a respite on the kill.
In total, three of Boston’s remaining five skaters on the blue line logged over 25 minutes of ice time (
Charlie McAvoy,
Krug and Chara) in Wednesday’s defeat — with those added minutes leading to a brutal result as the minutes ticked away.
During a putrid extra period of play that dragged on for 3:51 before
Carl Gunnarsson
mercifully ended the beatdown with a slap-shot winner, Boston labored when it came to beating the Blues’ suffocating forecheck — with
Craig Berube’s
club asserting its will in the O-zone for most of the entire OT frame.
- 8-0 edge in shot attempts
- 4-0 advantage in shots on goal
- 3-0 cushion in high-danger scoring chances
- … and, of course, the game-winning tally.
“Some of it was fatigue,” Cassidy said of the final minutes of Wednesday’s game. “I don’t know if they were out there for a long time, the defensemen might have been but the forward line I think had gotten out. … Obviously we didn’t manage the puck well, even the shift before, we just weren’t able to get it out, change the type of mentality and it snowballed on us.”
Even in Grzelcyk is sidelined going forward, adding another defenseman into the fold like
Steven Kampfer
or
John Moore
will at least give Boston another body to roll out during these taxing situations.
But few D-men possess the unique skillset that Grzelcyk offers — with Wednesday’s OT standing as a potentially terrifying omen as to what awaits against the Blues forecheck if Boston does not have Grzelcyk up and running this weekend.
, but Grzelcyk’s ability to make first passes to generate a breakout — or carry the puck out on his own — made him one of the most underrated (and valuable) skaters in the league this season.
When you look at possession exits (calculated as when
a defender either carries the puck out of the zone or completes a successful pass out of the zone), Grzelcyk has either carried or fed the puck out of the Bruins’ defensive zone on 49.4 percent of his total exit attempts — the third best percentage rate of any D-man in the NHL this season.
(Grzelcyk at his best, making a risky pass seem pedestrian while escaping a forecheck.)
“Losing the 16 minutes of Grzelcyk’s time, good puck mover, guy that can break down a forecheck when he’s on, and that was clearly a strength of theirs tonight and a weakness of ours breaking pucks out,” Cassidy said. “So that’s where we missed him the most I felt like. Getting back on pucks, he’s pretty good at quick skate move. A good clean pass.
“Get our forwards going through the neutral zone is a strength of our game; so, we lost some of that element and I think it showed.”
