The people at hockey games who shout “shoot” every five seconds are a uniquely frustrating bunch.
But maybe they’re onto something.
The Bruins’ second power play unit — which mainly consists of Nick Ritchie, Taylor Hall, Charlie Coyle, Craig Smith and Matt Grzelcyk — passed up on far too many shots in Boston’s Game 4 loss to the New York Islanders.
Far too often they were in a pass-first mentality and that drew the ire of head coach Bruce Cassidy.
“I think the second unit, I was disappointed,” Cassidy said over Zoom after the game. “They don’t get a lot of time behind the first unit, but it was an opportunity for them to step up. No one wanted to shoot the puck. They still practice a lot, and we have certain people we want to run it through. But every one of them refused to shoot the puck. We had it in the slot, we turned down a shot — down at the elbow, up top, so it just kills your momentum.
“Now you go in your own end and you’ve got guys that aren’t really playing together, so that could have helped us a lot. Even just to keep the momentum, so I was disappointed in that. … The lack of urgency to get a puck to the net, I think it was a bit of the formula tonight in general. We weren’t willing to shoot enough, I thought at least to sort of get to their goaltender. We paid the price for it. That’s why we didn’t score 5-on-5, we just turned down way too many shots.”
Ritchie, Hall and Coyle ended up getting around 1:10 of power play time each, while Smith was at 2:08 and Grzelcyk 2:03.
Perhaps the biggest kick in the pants though was when the Bruins couldn’t cash in on a penalty that came from a failed Isles goaltender interference challenge. Shortly after New York killed the penalty, it scored to tie the game at one and created an obvious momentum shift.
The Bruins have a tremendous collection of weapons on their top power-play unit, but they can’t trot them out there every single time. Maybe it requires a change in personnel or just more refining in practice, but Saturday’s effort obviously didn’t cut it.
