Ryan: Pastrnak or no Pastrnak, Bruins’ power play should have no excuses for current drought

There are very players in the NHL quite like David Pastrnak.

Quite the understatement, I know.

In an uber-skilled game that is being injected with more and more on-ice wizardry with each new draft class, Pastrnak still stands in a hallowed tier when it comes to his ability to serve as a cheat code in that offensive zone. 

With that patented release and heavy shot, Pastrnak’s blistering one-timer gives Boston a trump card on the power play — with that howitzer cutting through swaths of defensive structure with regularity.

Much like a Rivera cut fastball or an Ovechkin one-timer, opposing teams can gameplan and sketch out countless strategies to negate Pastrnak’s power-play snipe. But oftentimes, you just end up shrugging your shoulders and accepting the inevitability of it all. 

So with Pastrnak and the threat of that game-breaking shot currently out of the equation due to a nagging injury, it should come as no surprise that the Bruins’ power play was due for some regression while its top sniper licks his wounds. 

But no one expected this type of regression. 

With Thursday’s 3-2 loss to the Senators, the Bruins have now dropped three straight games in regulation for the first time since December 2019. A concerning outbreak of ailments — be it Pastrnak, Hampus Lindholm, Brandon Carlo, Matt Grzelcyk and now Linus Ullmark — have certainly contributed to those woes, no doubt. 

But if we’re assessing blame for Boston’s recent knack for hemorrhaging valuable points, it’s tough to overlook a power play that’s currently mired in an 0-for-23 rut. Even before Thursday’s debacle, in which Boston failed to cash in on another five bids on the man advantage, Bruce Cassidy was ready to take one of his club’s tried-and-true strengths to task.

“Lack of execution. I think we’re selfish,” Cassidy said of the power play following Tuesday’s loss to the Blues. “Guys are holding the puck too long wanting to make the play instead of letting the puck do the work. I think those two things are fairly evident.”

On Thursday night, the puck movement was a bit crisper at times — perhaps a byproduct of having a guy adept at slinging the biscuit from the blue line in Grzelcyk back in the fold. 

But without Pastrnak’s finishing ability, Boston’s big guns were once again left impotent. Even when Boston managed to stretch out Ottawa’s beleaguered PK structure, a Grade-A chance either didn’t manifest — or sailed wide of Anton Forsberg. 

“We were just off-net on way too many chances, which is a bit of our issue on the power play a lot,” Cassidy noted. “It's just coming back to haunt us now, even more, when you got a guy out that can hit the net and score and shoot it past the goalie, so he covers up for some of that. 

But we're just missing it too much and fighting it and that's guys who want to get it done. I give them credit for competing and wanting to get it done. We just need something good to happen on that power play. So they can just relax and start moving it like they're capable of.”

Yes, there’s no doubt that the Bruins miss Pastrnak and that patented shot. But it’s not as though a Pastrnak-led power play was akin to a Lamborghini engine revving up a beat-up Ford Focus.

Even without Pastrnak, the Bruins have more than enough firepower in place on that top unit to dice up PK units with regularity — or at least a hell of a lot more than this current 0-for-23 drought.

There are very few players like David Pastrnak, indeed.

But, and this may come as a surprise to some … but Patrice Bergeron is also pretty damn good — especially when directing traffic from the slot and snapping home Grade-A looks at the bumper.

Brad Marchand is as good a conductor of Grade-A seam passes as you can find from the half wall. Charlie McAvoy could be the first Bruins blueliner since Ray Bourque in 1995-96 to post 60+ points in a single season. And be it Taylor Hall or Jake DeBrusk, Cassidy has the luxury of deploying speed and skill at the netfront spot in order to retrieve pucks and keep O-zone possessions alive.

Simply put, this unit — sans Pastrnak — is still far too good to be operating at this sordid level, especially with Boston in desperate need of a steadying presence amid this recent freefall.

Pastrnak’s return would certainly help a great deal. But the B’s top scorer shouldn’t be the lone conduit that sparks a unit already anchored by a few Hall-of-Fame-caliber talents. 

“Frustration, as I said, is a useless emotion. So I'm not frustrated. I want to correct things,” Cassidy said. “We had some miscommunications on the bench tonight, we had some lack of focus, especially on the power play — when you're going back into your own end there, almost took us out of the game when we're getting some momentum and just finishing the play and then breaking the puck out.

"So certainly some guys that we rely on a regular basis every night aren't putting up the numbers right now for whatever reason. We'll look a little closer at that and I don't think it'll go on forever.

“They're too good.”

Quite the understatement, again.