Bruce Cassidy tossed just about everything into the blender Tuesday night and cranked that bad boy up to full blast.
The Boston Bruins head coach overhauled his team’s lines during the second period of their eventual 2-0 win against the Philadelphia Flyers, who entered the game having won each of their last nine games.
It’d be a tad too far to say the Bruins were a disaster five-on-five before the switch, but they left plenty to be desired, hence the changes.
Here’s how they started.
Brad Marchand–Patrice Bergeron–David Pastrnak
Nick Ritchie–David Krejci–Ondrej Kase
Sean Kuraly–Charlie Coyle–Jake DeBrusk
Joakim Nordstrom–Par Lindholm–Chris Wagner
Here’s how they finished.
Brad Marchand–Patrice Bergeron–Ondrej Kase
Sean Kuraly–David Krejci–David Pastrnak
Nick Ritchie–Charlie Coyle–Jake DeBrusk
Joakim Nordstrom–Par Lindholm–Chris Wagner
And if you look only at Corsi, all three new lines fared better than the groups that began the night together.
Natural Stat Trick
Cassidy ended up liking what he saw following the switch.
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“Well we weren’t generating enough, for one thing,” Cassidy said following the game. “The Krejci line hasn’t been producing so (we thought) ‘let’s not stick with it tonight and maybe revisit it on Friday. Get Pasta with (Krejci), maybe get him excited to play, they’d been together before, and then the rest was just a fallout of guys having to move around. Someone had to go up with Bergy, so it was Kase, let’s take a look at it, we don’t know a lot about him. Kuraly’s a good, responsible player with Krejci and Pasta so it gives them a bit of that conscious. Ritchie then fell down with DeBrusk and Coyle, (Ritchie) can compliment a Charlie Coyle by getting to the net.
“So some of the things you play around with in your mind when the trade happened with the new bodies and at some point you figure you may get to it. The Kuraly one is a bit of the outlier because he’s typically in a different spot, but because he’s playing left wing he got a chance to move up and I thought he made some nice plays on that line, showed some offensive acumen, so that’s good to know.”
There long has been petitioning to put countrymen Krejci and Pastrnak together in hopes that it would fix two big problems: Krejci’s inability to have a stable right winger, and Boston’s struggle to get consistent secondary scoring. Judging by Cassidy’s comments, he seems open to maybe giving Krejci and Pastrnak a shot together again. At times, the idea has been better in theory than practice (even with a larger sample size, Pastrnak’s Corsi for with Bergeron and Marchand is a little better than with Krejci), but nevertheless it’s still worth seeing what’s there.
One issue that remains though is DeBrusk playing on his off-side. It seems Cassidy is committed to not playing Nick Ritchie on the right, so he again has two left-shot wingers playing with Coyle. The Bruins really need DeBrusk to get going and he’s struggled while playing on the right wing, so the changes didn’t do much to fix that problem.
The Bruins don’t practice Wednesday, so Cassidy has a day to sit on these changes before determining whether he’ll keep them when the B’s return to practice in preparation for Friday’s game against the Buffalo Sabres. It’s no secret he enjoys swapping lines in practice and games, so one has to think we probably haven’t seen the end of these trios.
