Boston Bruins Need to Draw Opposing Penalties Earlier and More Often

Tyler Seguin’s initiative in the ninth minute of the second period wrote the Boston Bruins a radiant invitation to reverse the momentum in Saturday’s bout with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

With his team trailing 1-0 on the strength of a last-minute power-play goal by Evgeni Malkin in the opening frame, Seguin brooked a high-stick via Pascal Dupuis as he pushed the puck beyond the Boston blue line and into neutral ice.

The damage to Seguin’s mug was enough to grant Boston a four-minute man-advantage to sandwich the halfway mark of regulation. But the ensuing damage to Pittsburgh’s half of the scoreboard was ultimately negligible, with the Bruins mustering four shots on nine attempts during Dupuis’ double-minor.

With all due credit to Penguins goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury and his praetorian guards, that protracted shorthanded segment was the only major test they confronted in Saturday’s contest. After they passed it to preserve their brittle 1-0 edge, they augmented it to 2-0 and paced themselves to a 2-1 victory.

Both before Dupuis’ sentence and after his jailbreak, the Penguins committed no fouls and beat Boston stopper Tim Thomas once. The final upshot in most every statistical department, from the 2-1 score to Pittsburgh’s 31-30 faceoff victory to Boston’s 29-28 shooting edge, eclipsed how easy the Bruins made their visitors’ lives.

Pittsburgh might have authorized an equalizer and/or had to deal with a deficit if more Bruins had made like Seguin in his encounter with Dupuis. Instead, the host club reran its failure to fluster its opponents from Thursday night’s 3-0 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes.

Recall that, en route to letting the Hurricanes complete an unlikely sweep of their season series, the Bruins did not garner a power play until the night’s scoring was already complete early in the third period.

And not unlike the 22-shot shower from Thursday’s opening frame, there were early disturbances of a Boston advantage in the offensive zone on Saturday. While the shooting gallery was more level, the Bruins induced five unanswered Pittsburgh icings from the opening draw of the first period to the 4:34 mark of the second.

But mandated face-offs in one’s own end without a line change are not nearly punishment enough. The Bruins’ strike force never upped its intensity and thus lost its momentum before it could even ripen.

Boston needed to punish Pittsburgh less in the way of forcing them to lasso the puck and hastily thrusting it the length of the ice and more in the way of forcing them to lasso real, live puck-carriers in illicit manners.

Regardless of how often they convert, a sprinkling of consecutive power plays could at least have drained the opposing tanks with more rapidity.

In turn, the likelihood of delaying Malkin’s icebreaker or Matt Cooke’s insurance would improve. And the urge to penetrate Fleury, which Joe Corvo finally did to at least saw the deficit in half at 6:45 of the third period, thus spikes later and less rapidly.

Instead, the Bruins subsisted too heavily on their point patrollers, particularly through the first two periods. Of their first 20 shots on goal, 14 were off a defenseman’s twig. Of the six issued by a forward, two apiece came courtesy of Patrice Bergeron’s wingers, Brad Marchand and Tyler Seguin.

By day’s end, five defensemen registered 20 stabs at the Pittsburgh cage while four forwards combined for nine, with Marchand and Seguin each chipping in three. Some of that owes to Bergeron winning 13 out of 19 draws.

Conversely, the other top-six line was utterly barren. David Krejci, Milan Lucic and Rich Peverley all failed to test Fleury for the full breadth of Saturday’s game, seeing five of their attempts blocked and the other go wide.

That, in part, is a discredit to Krejci and Peverley combining for a 5-for-16 day at the dot.

Meanwhile, only two members of the other two forward units, Gregory Campbell and Zach Hamill, pelted Fleury at any point.

Translation: The 12 Bruins whose primary job is to generate offense failed to break double-digits in the SOG column and one out of the four lines was responsible for two-thirds of the limited output.

That disturbing disproportion in shot distribution underscored Boston’s shortage of activity in the depths of the attacking zone, the most fertile grounds for drawing power plays. More puck movement and feet movement within Fleury’s vicinity was in order, particularly from the Lucic-Krejci-Peverley line.

If the Bruins are to settle comfortably back into the driver’s seat in any given game, they must assume more consistent, collective puck control and dare their adversaries to pry it away from them. If the opponents must occasionally resort to trading in two minutes of lost manpower, so much the better for Claude Julien’s pupils.