One thing the Boston Bruins hated facing from a playoff-size media horde on Media Day at TD Garden was a series of questions about what happened last spring. They played nice but were matter-of-fact transparent about the fact that disappointment had been fully processed, its cud thoroughly chewed and spit out, and the lessons strained out of that nightmarish ending to a dream season.
As club president Cam Neely recently reminded the press, rearview mirrors are best broken.
Yes, the Bruins could have – should have – dismissed the Florida Panthers in five games. It should have been the first step to two months of playoff hockey. The put-away goal was there, it didn’t happen, and that opportunity lost was eclipsed over the summer by the Mt. Rushmore retirements of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, their faces chiseled into a generation of Bruins hockey that yielded a Stanley Cup championship, two subsequent trips to the title series and last winter’s historic campaign that broke regular-season points and wins records.
There is no going back and replaying what happened after the Bruins led in the third period of two potential series clinchers, and regardless of whether any player on the team felt any better about that collapse once the Panthers won the next two rounds far more convincingly (before a 10-day wait to play Vegas stole their mojo), the Bruins have turned the page. They had to, and they have, as an organization and as individuals.
Legitimate questions have been raised as to whether the Bruins had a team built only to win in the regular season. Even before Jim Montgomery took over the reins a year ago, Bruce Cassidy had (since taking over for Claude Julien in 2017) averaged 50 wins per 82 games. Who besides Scotty Bowman, while standing behind a bench tapping the shoulders of Larry Robinson, Serge Savard and Guy Lapointe, has done this in the NHL’s expansion era? Cassidy did, and it took chutzpah for GM Don Sweeney to cut the cord in 2022.
So last season, with all its x-factors that could have gone wrong but every one of them this side of Jakub Zboril’s comeback from ACL surgery went right, happened and unfolded as it did. Shame the Bruins didn’t leave the rink wearing ball caps instead of hockey helmets, but that’s water over a new sheet of ice.
We’re here now, and the Bruins are done talking about 2022-23. Good for them.
So it was in the most accidental of applications that newcomer Kevin Shattenkirk unwittingly touched on a strategic challenge that Montgomery’s Bruins failed to solve against Paul Maurice’s determined team in that fateful series.
“When you’re rimming a lot of pucks in the D zone, their defense(men) are able to pinch and keeps pucks alive, that’s what kind of makes our system a little bit harder to play in,” said Shattenkirk, who was not discussing the Bruins-Panthers series, nor was he asked to. “When we can get those loose pucks and make strong possession plays out of those areas, that’s where I think our skill level and those little, short-pass support plays are going to really shine and allow us to get out of pressure.”
Under Montgomery, the Bruins, to put it in terms Nick Foligno used in conversation with Rink Rap last season, went away from being a “shot-volume team” as coached by Cassidy to a puck-possession team. The new Monty Hockey evoked memories of Robbie Ftorek’s Bruins playing to a second-overall finish in 2001-02 (picture Joe Thornton and Bill Guerin working the puck in tight on Jose Theodore, followed by a mad scramble at the goalmouth, only to be denied when it mattered most).
“I can’t really compare it anything,” said Shattenkirk after Monday’s practice at TD Garden. “I do like it … when everyone understands and works together, it’s such a seamless … flow, even without the puck. … (Defensively) there’s a lot of handoffs and switches in the D zone, it’s very layered. But, again, when everyone understands it you can start to anticipate it and you can work in it faster, kill plays faster, but it takes some time. It’s taking me some getting used to for sure.”
A long tooth in the NHL – Shattenkirk will turn 35 on Jan. 29 – but brand new to the Bruins, the defenseman from New Rochelle, N.Y., is just learning a system he had never played under eight NHL head coaches over 13 years in the league.
Shattenkirk never played for Ftorek, but he played in the NHL for Joe Sacco, Davis Payne, Ken Hitchcock, Barry Trotz, Alain Vigneault, David Quinn (for whom Shattenkirk also played in the AHL), Jon Cooper and Dallas Eakins, none of whom employed the puck-possession system that Montgomery used so effectively last season to stymie opposing forecheckers.
“Offensively, it might not be as shot-volume (oriented) as it is quality (of shot), and not taking the shot from the outside if no one’s screening or at the net,” said Shattenkirk. “Part of that, too, that we don’t want to get confused with is trying to make too many plays. We still have to be a team … not afraid to chip pucks in and go win puck battles as well, and I think we realized that a little bit in preseason. We’ve gotten a little too cute at times. When we got back to the right way of playing, we’ve seen the results.
“I think another thing, too, is a big part of my game is getting the puck into the forwards’ hands with possession … the cleaner we can get out of our zone with tape-to-tape passes and especially passes through the middle to our centers, the way that this team is built, the team speed, it’s only going to help.”
What Shattenkirk, a newcomer to Monty Hockey, has already noticed while learning the system is that, when the opponent fires the puck around the boards it leverages the Bruins outside of the cluster that they want to play in (see his first comment above).
The Bruins like to create a numbers advantage in small areas, take over the puck and build out from there. If they already have it, that tight cluster of short-pass options gets opposing forecheckers that are seeking turnovers caught in Boston’s end of the rink while the Bruins are past them with numbers.
The Kryptonite applied in playoffs by Maurice’s rugged team was to rim the puck hard from one side of the rink to the other, forcing the Bruins to abandon their cluster to cut it off or for that possession to be sustained. The Panthers did this more and more effectively as the series wore on. As the banged-up Bruins began to tire, those sustained possessions lasted longer and became more frequent.
Their deadline haul also departed, the Bruins are obviously a different team now, one that should be less susceptible to injury over 82 games but also one significantly less skilled and less savvy especially down the middle of the rink, a place where the Boston Bruins had for most of their first century of history been at their best.
Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha (and eventually Matt Poitras) will grow in these roles but with the support of some elite, line-driving wingers.
But, while the Bruins were not able to see through their historic 2022-23 season to glory, the NHL remains a copycat league, and Rink Rap’s eye will be trained on opponents looking to disrupt what has been under Montgomery’s design a very successful breakout game. Maurice was one wasted scoring chance midway through the third period of Game 5 away from irrelevance to this conversation, but the fact the Bruins failed to put his team away opened the door for him to provide the league a blueprint that most assuredly will be imitated when the puck drops this fall.
That’s one part of the hockey that’s about to happen.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 