The Boston Bruins are exactly who we thought they were prior to the start of the regular season.
They aren’t the same hockey team that finished second in the NHL in offense last season and overwhelmed opponents to a record-breaking tune with offensive depth and the ability to excel in any style of game. Those days are gone without Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, and many of the other players that waved goodbye to the Black and Gold last summer due to salary cap constraints.
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Instead, the new edition Bruins are a group that can continue to win hockey games and enjoy success, particularly against the NHL’s weaker sisters, with a combination of stout defense and stellar goaltending that should have let everybody know this past summer that they’d be just fine this season. That’s exactly the puck formula applied in winning a no-frills 3-1 decision over a talent-light San Jose Sharks team at the SAP Center on Thursday night while improving to 3-0-0 on the young NHL season.
People really should have seen this coming when so many fans were predicting the Bruins would fall off a cliff without their Hall of Fame captain. They obviously weren’t going to finish second in the NHL in goals per game like they did last season, but they also led the league in goals against last year and won the Jennings Trophy with Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman.
Now this season the B’s have allowed a scant four goals in three games played and are second in the NHL with a .952 save percentage over that span as well. They’re riding Hampus Lindholm and Charlie McAvoy hard as both players are averaging well over 23 minutes of ice time per game, over four minutes more than the next-closest Bruins players in terms of usage and workload.
The Bruins are going to ride those blue-line stallions as far as they can take them, as they absolutely should. Lindholm was the guy on Thursday night finishing with a team-high 25:21 of ice time while managing the game in all situations and existing as a perfect fit for Montgomery’s aggressive, up-tempo system.
“He was moving his feet. He was really dominant with his skating, and he wanted the puck,” said Jim Montgomery to reporters afterward. “He was commanding the puck, so when he's doing things like that, he's very dominant player.”
Instead of running away from teams in the third period by virtue of a lineup that featured Taylor Hall on the third line while averaging 3.66 goals per game, they are prepared to win a lot of games by the score of 3-2 or 2-1 this season as they already have against Chicago, Nashville and now San Jose.
“Our goalies first and foremost with the way they’re able to play, both of them, it gives [us] a leg up each and every night. It starts with the goaltending on out and from there we are lucky enough to have quite a few defensemen back that we had last year,” said Brandon Carlo during training camp, when breaking down exactly how the Bruins would create a winning formula this season. “So I think there will be games where we’ll have to really push the pace and lead [from the back end]. That’s kind of different at times when the forwards last year were doing a great job putting the puck in the net.
“There might be some games on the back end and at the nets that we’re going to have to steal this year. It’s going to be a great challenge and I’m looking forward to it. Throughout my time here we’ve always been focused on the defensive side of the game. That’s not going to change. If we’re not putting as many pucks in, hopefully we’re keeping them out.”
It isn’t just the back end for the B’s either, as a hustling Pavel Zacha busted up a potential 2-on-1 on Thursday night with this hustling backcheck that canceled out a possible Sharks odd-man rush in a game where Boston never ran away from San Jose.
Great hustle from Pavel Zacha to break up the 2-on-1 chance for San Jose. pic.twitter.com/aEc7fO990W
— Conor Ryan (@ConorRyan_93) October 20, 2023
Will a defense-and-goaltending “attack” be a more difficult proposition against the NHL’s best teams after they get through an admittedly easy schedule stretch to open the year? Absolutely and that will start this weekend with a Saturday night game against a Los Angeles Kings crew that will be the best they’ve played this season to date.
But it’s also eminently doable if they can continue to be at least middle-of-the-road offensively as they are right now ranking 16th in the league with three goals scored per game, a mark they have hit in all three of their regular season tilts at this point.
They’ll need to diversify the offense a bit, though, as both David Pastrnak and James van Riemsdyk are averaging a goal-per-game with Pastrnak sitting on four goals through these first three games. Neither will sustain that pace, obviously, but at least it’s reasonable to expect that Pastrnak will score in most Bruins games this season while leaving plenty of slack for others to pick up on.
It's clear Jim Montgomery has picked up on the need to pump up the offense. That’s why he slotted 19-year-old Matt Poitras up with Brad Marchand to open the West Coast trip in San Jose, and the results were three 5-on-5 goals against the Sharks after managing just two even strength scores in their first two games.
And the B’s bench boss gave plenty of credit to a third line of JVR, Charlie Coyle and Trent Frederic that he pieced together to be a puck possession, checking trio also capable of kicking in offense as they did in the win.
“I thought Charlie [Coyle] was dominant tonight and I thought his two linemates owned the middle of the front of the net,” said Montgomery. “I thought that second goal really was an exclamation mark of what I think that line can be.”
Still, Montgomery’s message after the San Jose win is that they can be even better after he was wholly dissatisfied with the efforts of the club at Wednesday’s practice, and then again at the morning skate on Thursday shaking off the coast-to-coast jet lag.
“There’s enough to like [in the win], but also enough to teach from. We just need to get more consistent in how we want to play in certain areas of his game. [The rush defense] has got to be firmer,” said Montgomery to NESN postgame. “We’ve got to make it harder for people to get chances against us off the rush. That would be the number one concern right now.
“The second one would be building our team game. You saw it a couple of times. The second goal is a perfect example, and the first goal, of us building our offensive game and sustaining offense in the offensive zone.”
Clearly the offense is a work-in-progress, and it may be all season.
The message should be abundantly clear at this point: The Bruins will win hockey games this season largely because Charlie McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm are a dominant 1-2 defensemen tandem, and because Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman are again hockey hugging their way toward being the best goaltending duo in the NHL.
That’s going to be magic, winning formula for the Black and Gold until significant chances come to the current roster, and it remains to be seen exactly how far it will take them this year.