Losers of their last six games and looking nothing like the team that was hoped for and promised, the Bruins went back to the in-season version of a two-a-day on Friday at Warrior Ice Arena.
No, coach Marco Sturm did not reach back for a 20th century bag skate to cure the team’s ills. Those are mostly a thing of the past as a “teaching” tool. But rather he and his staff first ran his players through an extensive off-ice session to hammer home some of the finer points of his zone/man hybrid defensive system that, at the moment, his players do not seem to be grasping very well.
Then, nearly 40 minutes after the appointed time, they hit the ice to reinforce the study session.
While there was an air of desperation in the dressing room after Thursday’s painful 7-5 loss to the Anaheim Ducks, in which they scored two goals late in the third period to tie it up only to give up the winner 30 seconds later, Sturm is trying to stay the course. In two of the first three games for the B’s, all wins, they did in fact look like they had the system down, but it has fallen apart since them.
“They’re all humans. It’s not like when you show them something, it’s going to happen over night. We know that. Unfortunately, it always comes up when you lose. If we had gotten two wins out of the last four, it’s probably never an issue,” said Sturm. “How do you fix it? It’s time and also it’s practice. Unfortunately, we don’t have many practice days. That’s why today was a very productive practice, helpful practice. We had two practices actually. One was in here and one was (on the ice). We talked about it, I showed them a lot and we did the same thing on the ice. It’s something we need and something we have to get better at.”
While it already feels like the season is on the verge of slipping away, Sturm said he has to realize that what he’s trying to implement can’t be done with a flip of a switch.
“We’ve only been together for six, seven weeks. They’ve never played a different system, don’t forget that,” said Sturm. “I can get mad at those guys, my players, as much as I want. And I am mad. But at the same time, I have to realize they’d never played a different system. You’ve got to be patient. When you run into a losing streak, it doesn’t help. But that’s where we’re at.”
One thing he does appear to be giving up on, at least for the time being, is the Mason Lohrei-Charlie McAvoy defense pairing that has been together since the start of training camp, but they have had their troubles. They were on the ice for three goals against, including the game-winner on which McAvoy tried to get Lohrei to attack the puck carrier Nikita Nesterenko below the circle but wound up losing the slot area in the process. Nesterenko fed Troy Terry and there was your GWG.
“We want to close faster,” said Sturm of one of the key messages on Friday. “That’s something we showed today and worked on. We want to close a little bit faster, we want to outnumber teams. It doesn’t matter which area of the zone. And right now, we’re just a little bit hesitant. That’s why we got caught a couple of times.”
While Sturm wasn’t fully committed to the pairings, Lohrei was teamed with Andrew Peeke. Michael Callahan, who was called up from Providence on Wednesday and made his season debut on Thursday, bumped up with McAvoy. Nikita Zadorov, who crashed scarily into the boards in the second period but returned for the third, did not practice though Sturm said he expects him to play against the Colorado Avalanche. Hampus Lindholm (lower body), still not ready to be ruled in, skated with Henri Jokiharju.
The message to Lohrei?
“Keep it simple,” said Sturm. “He is what he is. If you’re not a sprinter, you’re not a sprinter … you will not change that. But you can change how simple you’ve got to play the game, how you’re going to respect the game. It’s a hard league. So he has to understand to just focus on his job doing nothing crazy. Just simplify things. But he cares and he wants to do something special and he wants to do more than he should be. And that’s when he gets in trouble.”
It will be a tall task to keep the streak from sliding to seven games on Saturday. The Avs are atop the league with a 5-0-3 record. While the B’s could argue they could have won five of the six games in their streak of futility, the game against the Avs was the outlier. The B’s were simply outclassed in that 4-1 loss in which some of their best players, including David Pastrnak, were outplayed and eventually benched.
“Obviously there’s a lot of high-end skill and they’re fast. Another test for our D-zone,” said Pastrnak. “We’re going to have to make it hard to play against and don’t make it easy on them because that’s when teams like Colorado take advantage of you and you’re going to be chasing all game. Play a really good defensive structured game and see where it takes us.”
Elias Lindholm also did not practice, but Sturm said that he expected him to play against the Avs.
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