The Bruins continue to score above and beyond expectations this season, and a massive underlying reason behind it is the performance of the power play. The unit will have the occasional off night as happened in the loss earlier this week to the Edmonton Oilers where a shorthanded goal allowed to Connor McDavid was pretty damaging, but there’s no denying the PP’s effectiveness when they are ranked fifth in the NHL scoring 26 percent of the time they hop over the boards.
The PP was just 1-for-3 in Saturday’s shootout loss to the Canucks, but part of the issue is that this Bruins team doesn’t get on the power play enough while being saddled into killing off a slew of their own penalties. They had done a better job recently of cutting down on the penalties taken, but they are still not getting on the man advantage quite enough, based on how dominant their man advantage can be.
"I love my/our power play…I love it,” said Marco Sturm. “And again, Stevie Spott does a great job. They came such a long way. They're a threat. I think they get excited every time they're out there. They can score, they can change a game, they win games. I absolutely love it."
There is no underplaying how instrumental the hiring of Spott has been to the success of the power play. The entries are varied and creative while consistently keeping opposing penalty killers off balance, and once in the zone there is movement and creativity rather than a lot of standing around waiting for David Pastrnak to do something.
Instead Pastrnak has become a playmaker on the PP leading the team with nine assists, and oft-times setting up Morgan Geekie as the leader with seven PP goals on the season. But the really good thing is that the PP scoring is spread out with Pavel Zacha and Elias Lindholm boasting four PP goals apiece and a slew of other players having scored on the man advantage as well.
The other side of the special teams coin, however, is a penalty kill that is beginning to run into some issues after a lot of work through the first half of the season. Boston’s penalty kill is 17th in the NHL with an 80.5 percent success rate and underscores a 19th-ranked defense (3.14 goals allowed per game) that still needs improvement if the Bruins are going to be sustainably successful.
But the Bruins wouldn’t even be in a playoff spot if they didn’t improve from last season’s predictable, slow power play attack that was pretty easy for opponents to stop, and instead this year it’s turned into a lethal weapon for the Black and Gold.
ONE TIMERS
• It’s pretty interesting to go into a deep dive conversation with Morgan Geekie about baseball, his family’s love for the game and how he once was a youngster that needed to make a choice between his first love, baseball, and the sport of hockey that he ultimately had the brightest future in as a pro.
Both Morgan and his younger brother Conor Geekie turned out to be NHL players while another Geekie brother, Noah, played collegiate baeball and is now a coach at the Okotoks Dawgs Academy. Given their birthplace in the farmlands of Manitoba it feels like an outpost as far as baseball is concerned without a Major League Baseball team anywhere close to them, but Geekie loves baseball so much that he gifted all of his Bruins teammates customized baseball gloves once he signed his six-year, $33 million contract extension with the Black and Gold.
Morgan Geekie gifted all the Bruins customized baseball gloves after signing his extension ⚾️ pic.twitter.com/cBWdHid704
— Spittin' Chiclets (@spittinchiclets) December 8, 2025
“Normally, I feel like, when guys sign a long-term contract, they do like a dinner or something like that. I was just trying to think of something different,” said Geekie to NHL.com. “I was getting a glove for myself, and then it was actually my wife Emma who was like, ‘You should get one for all guys, that should be your gift.’ I kind of just ran with it.”
Geekie made each glove the colors of that players college hockey team, junior hockey team or their home country if it was a European or Russian player, and had new gloves for each of the 23 players on the B’s roster at the start of the regular season.
“For me, I was looking for something that meant a lot to me to give to them,” Geekie said. “It makes you feel good that they appreciate stuff like that – and I know everybody does. Just because baseball is such an important part of my family, to be able to share that with people, whether they use the glove or not – as a paper weight or whatever – I still think it’s pretty cool.”
• A very curious decision to use Andrew Peeke for his first career shootout attempt in Saturday night’s 5-4 loss to the Vancouver Canucks at TD Garden. One could understand if Marco Sturm was playing a hunch, or just tossing a bone to a player that had just made a big play, after had scored the game-tying goal late in the third period to send the game into the extra session, but we are also talking about a D-man that’s scored 14 goals in 345 career NHL games as a true stay-at-home defenseman.
But, instead Sturm explained it as a conscious choice after watching Peeke use a certain move at practice that he actually shied away from given the chance in an actual shootout.
“We practice [the shootout] all the time,” said Sturm. “He does one move and he did it really well. Not just once, a few times. I thought he was going to do it again, and he didn’t. So that’s why I picked him. So that’s on me.”
The shootout can be a total crapshoot, particularly when you get beyond the first three shooters in a sudden death situation, so it isn’t like that move was the difference between winning and losing Saturday’s game.
But it does make you scratch your head just a little bit.