BOSTON — The Boston Bruins’ lines at puck drop Friday night looked far, far different than they did after 60 minutes of play.
That’s because Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy didn’t shy away from shuffling things up front often in Boston’s 2-1 Game 5 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs at TD Garden in Game 5 of their first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series. The B’s now trail the best-of-seven series 3-2 as they travel to Toronto for Game 6.
There were some permanent changes, with Danton Heinen dropping to the third line and David Pastrnak going to the first. However the constant changes more often took place in the bottom six. Cassidy essentially shortened his bench and started dispersing his fourth-line guys on the third unit with Charlie Coyle and Danton Heinen. That led to Noel Accari, Chris Wagner and Sean Kuraly all logging minutes on the third line.
Those changes led to guys like David Backes (4:36), Wagner (9:20) and Acciari (9:55) all play extremely limited roles.
After the game, Cassidy explained his decision to mix things up.
“I didn’t think we had energy in our bottom of the lineup,” Cassidy said. “(The Maple Leafs) don’t generally play their fourth line a lot, so if our fourth line, the guys we use in that role, aren’t going together in-sync then it works against us. That’s the way I saw it. We had a couple of shifts that I thought they got outplayed to a certain extent, (but) when I used them individually in pieces with different lines I thought we had a better result. So we kind of went three lines and added a player here or there, I thought that might work out better for us.
“Obviously in the end we lost the game, so who knows,” Cassidy continued. “I don’t know if it’s a difference in the game, the minutes that were distributed because they’re generally energy (guys) anyways, and we lacked a little bit of that early. They’re not guys that are going to fill the scoresheet and that’s what we were lacking towards the end obviously.
“We didn’t generate enough, that’s probably my biggest beef. Less about the play of individual players, but the group not generating enough offense with shots or shot recovery situations where we could take advantage coverage. We just turned down too many shots in my estimation.”
Kuraly, who was among those most severely impacted by the juggling, wasn’t using it as an excuse.
“I think it’s something we’ve been used to all year,” Kuraly said. “You’ve got to be ready to play, and on any given night you can be on any line. That’s how we’ve come up as a team and we know that, that’s part of our style I think.”
Since taking over the bench, Cassidy’s calling card has been his willingness to mix things up early and often in-game. Judging by his Bruins coaching record, it’s fair to say he gets it right more often than not. But, obviously, sometimes things don’t pan out.
Game 5 just happened to be one of those nights, and the timing couldn’t have been much worse.
