Mandatory Credit: Bob DeChiara-Imagn Images | Bob DeChiara-Imagn Images
As the Olympic season wraps up, the Boston Bruins sit at 57 games played, and the Trade Deadline incoming at them at distressing speeds. The NHL season’s truncated schedule to make room for Team USA and Team Canada’s all-timer tournaments has now created a dead heat of a last two months that will test the Boston Bruins in ways they have only rarely been tested before.
Now, let’s check in with the Boston Bruins, and discuss what they need to do next in this blisteringly paced season.
The Basics
The Boston Bruins are 32-20-6 in 57 games played, have 69 points in the standings, have scored 195 goals and let in 176 goals. Their home record is 17-8-3, their away record is 15-11-3, and at the end of the break they had a 6-3-0 record through their last ten games; their most recent one a controversial overtime loss to the Florida Panthers due to general Panthers behavior of the sort you’d imagine they get up to.
Their leading scorer is Morgan Geekie at 32 goals through 56 games played, and their leader in points is David Pastrnak with 71 points in 52 games.
The Analytics
In terms of offense, The Boston Bruins are 16th in the NHL in Corsi-For per 60 minutes; which is a measurement of shot attempts over the course of a 60 minute hockey game; this sits at 57.55. They are 19th in Fenwick-For per 60 minutes, which is a measurement of unblocked shot attempts over the course of a 60 minute hockey game. This sits at 40.97. They are 22nd in the NHL at Expected-Goals for per 60, which sits at 2.51, and is a measure of what we can call “shot quality”. They are 12th in the league at High Danger Goals-For per 60 minutes, which sits at 1.31.
From this, we can at least determine that while the Bruins do not have the puck very often and are letting the game come to them rather than the other way around, when they do have the puck, they usually score when they’re close to the net. This tracks based on what we can see about finishing data from HockeyViz.com.
Defensively, the Boston Bruins are quite a far cry from where they were years ago. They are 27th in the league at Corsi-against per sixty with 60.17. Fenwick-against per sixty is 24th in the league at 49.07, and they are 29th in Expected-Goals Against per 60 at 2.9. This suggests they are letting up a
lot of shots, many of whom are pretty good ones at that.
Definitely gonna call that a “needs improvement”.
The things that work…
David Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie are putting in heroic work!
For a good six weeks last year, the Bruins became the Pasta and Geekie show as they began to rapidly overtake just about everybody else on the depth chart in terms of NHL Scoring. To the delight of fans, that hasn’t gone away; if anything it’s actually improved quite a bit.
Pastrnak has developed a much more rounded playmaking addition to his game game in response to what I am sure is someone making it abundantly clear to him that he is probably the most well rounded player left on the team, and he put his best effort forward into becoming more than just a really good slapshot from the circles, and the team is better off for it.
Meanwhile, Morgan Geekie, of all people, is playing like he’s going to be a Rocket Richard finalist. That’s going to happen. We’re all here to watch that now.
What part of this is playing with great talent, what part of this is the power play being good, what part of this is him shooting like crazy (currently sitting at 24%), it’s hard to assign credit where it’s due on his game, but make no mistake, he is a blast to watch here.
Pleasant surprises abound in the depth!
Part of what’s made the Bruins sudden return to being watchable is that, for the most part, the depth has actually started to come alive!
Lots of flowers go to Fraser Minten, as he was an inexpensive add last year who showed a lot of promise, and has truly flourished in his role on the third line, but he’s hardly the only one! Viktor Arvidsson looks like he belongs after a slow start! Hell, it looks like he’s finally found his scoring touch again! Pavel Zacha has once again found the ability to potentially end up a 20+ goalscorer again! Marat Khusnutdinov has been the perfect chaotic addition to Pasta and Lindholm’s line! Lindholm himself seems to have found twine a little more which helps his case a
lot! And hey, even Casey Mittelstadt seems to be finding a scoring touch against the right teams.
This was a hallmark of Marco Sturm teams in the AHL in that yes, they do have obvious stars, but they do tend to have a crop of players who start following in those stars wake to carve some goals out for themselves, and in an NHL this deep across the board it never hurts to have anyone who’s willing to step up.
Sturm’s Team never quits.
Even if the Bruins are not great, and sometimes they can lay an egg through at least 20 minutes of play…they are not out of it. Something in the locker room gets said, the team locks in, and the game changes. Not always for the better, but they do make something happen.
If there is one major positive that Marco Sturm has imparted upon these guys, that I think contributed to some early frustration within the team, is that they know they are never out of it, and relish the opportunity to be something special.
According to MoreHockeyStats.com, a fantastic resource for the kind of niche stat that this is; the Boston Bruins are 9th in the league in winning games in which they are behind by the third period. They’re in a multi-man tie for third if they’re only down a goal! Part of that of course is probably the power play; which is not just good, but actively great at 3rd in the entire league, but it does come down to effort. It makes for a genuinely fun watch even if they’re playing like garbage to start the game because yes; anyone can go be the hero if they want to be, and there are enough talented guys in the NHL now that it doesn’t just have to be Pasta or Geekie.
Given where we started with this team? I will take that one
thousand times over. No contest.
…and the stuff that needs improvement.
The Bruins are in dire need of help up the middle.
So there’s two ways to look at this; the non analytics way and the analytics way. In the interest of fairness, I will address both.
From a more surface level side of things, just about every Center on the team is…
fine. It’s a little weird that Mark Kastelic has the highest faceoff percentage of all
From an analytical side of things…
Well…It’s a good thing Sean Kuraly and Fraser Minten are having good seasons and Zacha is a fantastic power play guy, because this is kind of a rough place to be right now with your top six centers looking like this.
I’m not gonna hold Pavel Zacha’s draft acumen against him; he’s still a very good player and he’s third in goals on a team that has largely let two guys do all of the scoring for them, and even if he’s not exactly living entirely up to the level of ice time he gets through on-ice impact, results are there. They may be
Lindholm however…Lindholm I no longer feel any passion, fury or concern with. I know what he is, and he is not a 1st line center in the NHL. He might be a good 3rd C! That’d be a good spot for him at this point! But he’s not a 1st liner anymore and he is here for what feels like forever unless cooler heads prevail and the Bruins do something to get him outta here. It is by the grace of god that he gets to play with two players who can mask a lot of the busy nothing he does out there, and that should be cause for concern. This kind of thing becomes painfully apparent in the playoffs, and unless Lindholm has one last masterclass season in him, I think his usage on this team needs to be rethought immediately.
We do need to talk about Mason…
At the beginning of the season, we set what I think was a very reasonable goal for Lohrei to meet; just be A Guy this year.
Do not cause too much trouble and break even on defense this year. This was largely attainable for him; Lohrei’s ranginess, shot, and skating talent are undeniable qualities in his favor as a skater, particularly in a defense corps that still has a lot of trouble trying to leave the zone themselves. When he is at his best, you can absolutely see why the team wants him to remain an NHL skater and on their team.
He has however, largely failed to meet that lofty goal of “be boring”.
What is increasingly a problem for the Bruins is that his play recognition and game “sense” is routinely far behind the rest of his skillset, and it remains a major fault in his game that usually becomes his teammates’ problems in short order. Mason Lohrei has done something at least once in all of the contests he’s been a part of that drew attention to this particular flaw of his game, and usually dragged his defense partner into that boondoggle. It didn’t
always end in a goal-against, but Lohrei’s consistent struggles to make good decisions with and without the puck inevitably end up dragging out defensive zone time for a team that already struggles with that.
Lohrei’s ability is constantly hampered by a decision-making that would have him out of the league were it not for the macrophilic tendencies of the organization trying to find
something for him to do. This was a recurring problem with his defense partners in the past, and on some level the team tried to mitigate it by ensuring he had stoic partners who wouldn’t screw up nearly as badly, but it is absolutely unacceptable for a player they keep trying to dip into first pairing minutes.
Really, the worst part is that we know good performances for Lohrei are entirely possible and
can happen. It is something he can be not just once every ten games but every game if he puts the effort forward and isn’t trying to force plays with the confidence of Icarus turning his wings sun-ward. Mason Lohrei is a good hockey player when he is focused! The problem is that focus seems to wander consistently, and that leads to trouble that people notice. Him getting benched and the team’s ability to at least stay ahead of opponents improving dramatically has only made it
Of course, he’s far from the only one.
…But he’s just the tip of the iceberg of a pretty poor defense.
I really cannot overstate how Lohrei’s large, flamboyant disaster shifts are just the loudest parts of a defense that is in dire need of anyone to recognize what they’re doing. If you are a fan who reconnected with the team back in the 2009-10 season, what you see on the ice feels spiritually incorrect… and yet, here we are, with a defense that is frankly pretty bad all around.
Lohrei’s issues are well known, but there’s a little bit of everything across this lineup when the defense is off it’s game: baffling decision-making with the puck, slow skating in just about every direction, criminal lack of play recognition leading to puck watching, whiffing on checks, over committing on checks, baubling the puck when you have it in the offensive zone…if I pointed at one name as the culprit, two more I didn’t would follow it up by doing the same things. It’s a unique problem that now follows this squad; Everybody’s struggling to get the puck out of their own end at the moment, and it will continue to be an issue until Marco Sturm adjusts something drastically with his staff, or there are adjustments made to the people putting that system into place on-ice.
And let’s not just leave it at the defensemen! Let us make it abundantly clear that the forwards are
not helping much whatsoever in this defense and it does not matter who they are in the slightest! Pasta? Already not known for his defense but his impact has lessened, Kuraly? Pure offense guy now. Lindholm? Active liability. Jeannot? Nope. Mark Kastelic? Surely he’s good at this right? Not even close. Everybody shares some blame for this.
Are there positive points? Sure! Charlie McAvoy has once again found his game and while he may not be the most defensively sound player, he’s still getting the puck moving in the right direction! Nikita Zadorov has tried his damnedest into being a reasonable , and has slowly worked himself up into being a sort of ideal 2ndish-1stish pairing defender you can trust with most assignments! Jordan Harris has otherwise been a phenomenally talented player who seems to like playing close to home because he’s one of the very few Bruins defenders who is above water when it comes to possession, and frankly he is sorely missed! Hampus Lindholm when he wasn’t injured definitely seemed like he was a net positive!
But that’s not making up for the fact that this is a unit that needs an overhaul across the board, and it’s not going to
…And some things we still haven’t learned yet.
The Boston goaltending position is…getting there????
So here’s the thing: Both Joonas Korpisalo and Jeremy Swayman have played some strong hockey for the Bruins this year. They have put together genuinely strong games coming into and more than likely out of the Olympic Break. They have also put up some spectacular clunkers that have forced the team to play outside of their comfort zone when they just don’t have it. But if there can be said to be a positive, then having one goaltender who is at the absolute least, slightly above 2025-26’s average SV% must be it.
Jeremy Swayman was due for a return to form. While fans were ready at the drop of a hat to find a reason to get rid of him the minute ink hit paper on his very big contract that he spent a lot of time out with, the reality is that the Bruins #1 goaltender was probably
not his 24-25 disaster season; if only by reasoning that there were too many things playing against him; the team’s offense was spluttering, their ability to hold the puck was non-existent, and their defense was an utter nightmare. Now, he has goal support and the defense in front of him has progressed to merely bad, so at the very least we can say that his contract did not in fact sap him of all of his capacity to be a good goaltender.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his specific concerns.
I have dubbed this the “Swayman thing”, because calling an effort thing is wrong and calling it a quirk cheapens it’s impact on games, and here it is; he is usually due for at least two goals against. They’re going to make you slap your head in exasperation. They’re gonna be awful. And then he locks in; that third goal-against becomes a herculean task that requires sustained pressure and a real great shot to beat him that third time. Most of the time, Swayman gives the Bruins a chance to win with that thing. It’s a big part of what made him so valuable to the team in the first place. But in a season where the defense is so routinely awful, even he has his limits, and the thing goes from cute but annoying to actively aggravating. It’s hard to put the most blame on either the defense in front of him or Swayman himself, but it’s something that the team desperately needs to get control of. When he’s on, he’s great! But that can be changed at the drop of a hat.
Joonas Korpisalo has also seen a lot of improvement which started at “effectively unplayable unless you were actively looking for a shot at the Mathew Schaefer sweepstakes” and is now just barely under the League’s average SV% of .893. He’s even got a shutout to his name! The problem of course, is that if you’re putting up .893, the real issue is consistency, and even between him and Swayman, the rubber-band results are kind of hard to ignore. There are some games back to back that make you wonder if he’s finally turning a corner…and then boom, sub-.800 SV%.
All of this leaves the Bruins goaltenders in a weird spot. We know the defense is bad. We know that both of these guys surely can’t be
as bad as their previous season, but just how much better when your eccentricities are single-handedly geared towards making your team look bad and you look worse even if long-term you can probably win with them if you support them? What happens if you genuinely improve the skaters in front of them and they just stay like this or get worse? Are you really in a position to try and fix it when you keep giving out talent to other teams at this position,
even if they themselves may never do this again?
The goalies, like they always are, remain an enigma. A frustrating one.
What the hell is the Atlantic Division and the NHL in general this year?
It seems the big word for sports in 2025 and going into 2026 is “uncertainty”.
Go take a look at the standings. Really. Go look at them.
Vegas and Edmonton are in a heated battle for the Pacific with just about half their division. The Pittsburgh Penguins,
those Pittsburgh Penguins, are in a dead heat to try and catch the Hurricanes. The Stanley Cup champions are down with New Jersey and NYR at the bottom of the eastern conference. The
only bastion of normalcy this year has been the Central Division, and even then the Colorado Avalanche have begun faltering, allowing Minnesota and Dallas a chance to catch up.
Like we all expected, right?
Parity has at long last hit the NHL like a bomb and I regret to inform you that it has genuinely produced some pretty solid hockey. It has also produced at least three divisions that are absolutely rife with the inability to truly seize a spot in the wildcard, and it’s meant checking the standings has gone from a thing maybe two teams maximum do to something just about everybody does in rapid succession because they now change that fast. Sure, there are some true dorks who want to know who’s “really good” and all that, and I say “That’s what the playoffs are for” and “Didn’t you say you don’t care about made-up numbers?”, but right now I can say with delight that the NHL season is truly unpredictable now.
Does that mean I don’t think it can hurt
Boston any? Oh my, no.
If anything, I think we can agree that Boston may be one of the most vulnerable teams in this rat race because they are only just in the playoffs at this point. Sure, 69 points looks pretty nice now, but are you gonna count on the Jackets beefing it enough to get some distance? You really think the Caps are gonna stay in this weird mushy middle period before one of those russians decides to go on a heater? You think the Islanders are gonna be third in the Metro forever? There are a
lot of teams looking for space in this wildcard right now, and the only one I think who has a good shot right now of keeping it is the goddamn Buffalo Sabres of all teams. The Sabres! And I could be
totally wrong about that because this season has had nothing
but shocking swerves!
This position they’re in is one they need to put a good foundation under quickly or they’re gonna find out how fun it is to float a house.
Do you stay the course on a steady re-tool? Or go and add big-time in pursuit of more of “The Juice”?
The Bruins were probably not supposed to be here this year.
But give ‘em credit! They’re healthy-ish, the stars are meeting the moment most nights, they acquired players who found specific niches for themselves, and made some decent bets that have for the most part paid off. Being back in a wildcard spot after last year? That feels like you’re well ahead of schedule!
Yeah, funny thing about that. Sometimes you can get so ahead of yourself you forget the details. Like hit the train in front of you.
They still need to put a
lot of work into meeting the Lightning, the Red Wings, and the Habs where they are right now. That will take time, and it will take extremely careful adjusting of the roster to get there. They still need to get younger, they definitely need to get faster, and they need to get deeper. Nothing less will do. The teams around them are already there. They need to play catch up and fast.
But…“The Juice” beckons.
This phrase; “The Juice”, haunts this team like a wraith.
Ever since Jim Montgomery correctly identified that he didn’t have nearly as good a team as he wanted using that phrase, and that coaching could only get you so far without this one phrase; a heady mix of talent and want-to that he tried his damnedest to get out of the roster…I really think he pissed off somebody above him in a way that feels distinctly personal. Just about every single decision made at the beginning of the year and offseason felt like it was in direct service to proving Montgomery wrong. In fairness? It has started to show some fruit!
But they do need more. This isn’t close to enough and I think the team is aware of that…but I do fear that somebody, can’t say who, couldn’t pick who they are out of a lineup, who gets to make decisions about this team, is still fuming about that comment. The rumors of Justin Faulk and Rasmus Ristolainen reek of that kind of nonsense; looking for a “fire” in the room where talent won’t be given a wick to light.
Spite can become poisonous if left too long in the bloodstream. I’m a little concerned it may force them to do something rash.
…So, what do they do?
Well, let’s just say the taking stock period is either well underway or actively coming to a close. We have at least some idea of what this team is, and its issues are pretty clear.
Were it me in charge, I think the goal looks like this:
- Get a 1C
- Admittedly more a long term goal and one that maybe Hagens or Letournneau can fill as they’ve been having excellent seasons in college puck, but for the here and now it’s clear that top 6 center talent is going to need to be a priority going forward.
- Make a painful decision on defense.
- Somebody you like is probably gonna have to go alongside someone you don’t if the B’s want to improve their game on the blueline. Might mean Lindholm, may end up being Aspirot, could even mean Zadorov, but we can’t sit here and act like this is ignorable. Something needs to give, and in order to get something you’re gonna have to hold your nose and think about a championship future and defensemen are something the Bruins have at least a few of.
- Just please don’t get Rasmus Ristolainen or Justin Faulk; we’re not cavemen and this team doesn’t need another old guy or a big guy who hits but doesn’t defense well; they have enough of those.
- Weaponize your reputation.
- Sweeney’s best deal of last deadline was explicitly using the Boston Bruins brand against a GM and staff who didn’t do the reading, and got a pick and Fraser Minten out of it. As such, it is the solemn duty of both the team and the coach to gin up a player in just such a way that a GM who is Not Intelligent buys it hook, line, and sinker. Unfortunately due to the way the Leafs are playing, that is unlikely to be Brad Treliving a second time. You may have to move on to Patrik Allvin.
- Keep getting draft picks.
- They’ve already got a pair of firsts for 2026 and 2027. James Hagens and Will Zellers are coming alive, and Dean Letournneau is starting to show the promise of his 25th overall selection in the 2024 draft. That’s a good start. Your cupboard went from last to about middle of the pack to close to the top ten in under a few years, but the B’s should not take this lightly. Even one graduation to the league next year would be a boon for them now, but take a name out of their prospect pool; something that is still quite thin. Whatever you do this deadline season, make sure an early round pick is thrown in for it.
The season will go by faster than you think, and with this retool moving much faster than anticipated, we can only hope now that the Bruins are seeing this year with clear eyes, and see that the future has needs that must be met here in the present.
But until then? Let’s see how far we can take this.
