It’s getting to the time of year when the best players for the Boston Bruins need to step it up if they’re going to crash the Stanley Cup playoff party.
The B’s could only scratch for a pair of goals in the third period in a 4-2 loss to the San Jose Sharks on Thursday night, where they outshot the Sharks, but couldn’t finish off enough plays against a San Jose goalie in Alex Nedeljkovic, who admittedly played very well while making 39 saves for the Sharks.
“We were just looking for that one goal, and it just didn’t happen for maybe too long,” said Marco Sturm. “We know once we get one going, we get the crowd going and we can change the game. But for some reason it was a little off today and we weren’t sharp. We had early chances and couldn’t score, and that was the hockey game.”
But the game also continued a trend since the Olympic break, where Morgan Geekie and Elias Lindholm are among a number of key B’s players that haven’t fully found their games since the break. Some of that may be a sluggish return from a long NHL break, and some of it might be free ice simply becoming harder to come by as the games get more competitive in the final weeks with key points on the line.
But Geekie doesn’t have a single 5-on-5 point during six games in the month of March, and Lindholm has just a single 5-on-5 point in that same amount of time. Neither player cracked the score sheet in Thursday night’s loss, where they didn’t have enough offense, and both players were on the ice for a disastrous shorthanded Colin Graf goal after Lindholm lost the initial offensive zone faceoff.
Once Sturm lost patience with his lines and switched Pastrnak to skating with Fraser Minten and Marat Khusnutdinov – and they immediately responded by scoring a goal – it was pretty clear he didn’t love what he was watching.
“I was just trying to get something going. I felt like all of the lines got stuck,” said Sturm. “I thought David [Pastrnak] had a little bit of something, and maybe he didn’t get enough help. That’s why I put [Fraser Minten] there and Khusnutdinov there to try to generate a little something.
“It was too flat for me today. Guys tried but at the end of the day it just wasn’t good enough. Top guys need to be your top guys and that’s why in those kinds of moments you need them even more. Unfortunately, we just didn’t really have it today.”
In total, the Bruins have scored
