David Pastrnak can’t legally buy a drink for another two years, so it’s safe to say he has plenty of things to learn. But how to score the puck is not one of them.
The 19-year-old Boston Bruins winger demonstrated his scoring prowess once again Saturday afternoon, tallying two of Boston’s three goals to help lift the B’s to a 3-1 win over the New York Islanders at TD Garden.
Pastrnak’s outburst gave him four goals in four games after he lit the lamp Thursday against the Carolina Hurricanes. His scores, coupled with Loui Eriksson’s first-period power play tally, kept an impressive streak going for the Pastrnak-David Krejci-Eriksson line, which now has scored the team’s last five goals.
“Yeah, that line was good for us (Saturday),” head coach Claude Julien said. “I thought David had one of his better games there in a while, and I thought with David Krejci and David Pastrnak, like I said, right from the get-go you could see his feet moving really well. He had good speed, had their (defensemen) on their heels, so that was a good combination.”
Both of Pastrnak’s goals were set up by his teammates — his first on a perfect cross-ice pass from Krejci and his second on an off-the-boards chip from Eriksson — but the young Czech forward continued to show his knack for making the most of those opportunities.
“I play with two great guys with very high skill,” Pastrnak said. “So, (I’m) focusing to just fill in on the line, and twice they found me, and it was easy for me to just put the puck in the net.”
On the flip side of the coin, of course, is Pastrnak’s game outside the offensive zone, as the second-year prospect has been prone to turnovers and defensive lapses that have caused head coach Claude Julien to shorten his shifts. But sometimes the good outweighs the bad for Pastrnak, and that appeared to be the case Saturday.
“Sometimes he’s hanging onto the puck and he’ll turn it over,” Julien said. “We don’t want it to be turned over in tough areas, and he’s got to get better at that. That’s the thing: When you’re skating like you were (Saturday), in his case, he was a real threat on offense, and he was skating well, and things were happening offensively, so there’s no reason to make those changes.
“So, again, these are my decisions that I make along the way, and I feel that when they’re needed, they’re done, and when they’re not, and he’s playing the way he is, he can continue to play.”
Julien and the Bruins know Pastrnak is a work in progress, but it’s performances like the 19-year-old flashed Saturday that prove his ceiling is very high.
Thumbnail photo via Greg M. Cooper/USA TODAY Sports Images
