The Bruins are off to a great start, but can they keep it going all the way to the Stanley Cup? - The Boston Globe
"I didn’t know we were this good," said coach Jim Montgomery. "We have depth at every position.”
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What we have here, one quarter of the way into the NHL season, is a Bruins team that has drastically outperformed expectations. The question now becomes, can they keep it going for another 61 games, and then a couple of months of grueling, often torturous, Stanley Cup play?
For that answer, please see this space when the playoffs begin at the start of May, albeit with this one caveat: This is the same space that in September had the Bruins slotting in again as a No. 7-8 wild-card contender. Which is why spiked eggnog is a holiday staple in your faithful puck chronicler’s hydration care kit.
Linus Ullmark, now in his eighth season and still with fewer than 200 NHL games on his résumé, has shimmied his way among the league’s tiny group of elite backstops (a group that can change year to year). Up until his injury on Friday, Ullmark, 29, had looked every bit the franchise netminder that the Sabres, who selected him as the 17th goalie in the 2012 draft, believed they were cultivating before he bolted to Boston as a free agent in July 2021.
A year ago, a vocal group of fans and media deemed Ullmark a grandiose waste of money, tossing him high on the heap of what they defined as the front office’s profound faux pas. Now he’s front and center in the Vezina Trophy conversation.
Worth noting that the Bruins in 2012 used their first-round pick (No. 24) on Malcolm Subban, the second goalie taken in that draft. Andrei Vasilevskiy was the top tender taken that year, five stops ahead of Subban.
Hand up, please, if you’d like a touch or two of that eggnog.
Hampus Lindholm, the Bruins’ leading scorer (4-14–18) on the back end for the first quarter, has produced far beyond his curriculum vitae. The big, smooth-skating Swede never popped for more than 34 points in his nearly nine seasons with the Ducks. Now he’s tracking upward of 70 points and, at age 28, looks like he could be the David Krejci to Charlie McAvoy’s Patrice Bergeron on the back end for the remainder of this decade.
As for up front, the agents of change have not been as significant or unexpected as Ullmark and Lindholm. Yes, Jake DeBrusk again has some zip and pop in his game, and Nick Foligno, after a year spent framing a case to be bought out, survived a brief trip to the October waiver wire and is providing near par value on that two-year, $7.6 million free agent deal he signed in July 2021.
Rather than outsized individual performances, though, the greatest difference up front has been the Montgomery method, perhaps best summed up by pace and positioning across the four lines. Montgomery preached pace on Day One — standard practice in today’s bench bossing — but he delivered the message with an underlying demand for positioning and anticipation.
To oversimplify, Montgomery has the forwards in perpetual skate-and-shoot mode, and of at least equal importance, the defensemen are eager to do the same. The forwards have to be alert, and quick to cover for those blue-liner forays.
This approach does not exactly make the Bruins the early-1980s Oilers reincarnate. Those teams never will be replicated (see the fine print of the salary cap for verification). But there is no denying this a more mobile, synchronized offense than what we saw under Bruce Cassidy
“It’s much different,” said Montgomery, asked earlier this month to compare his perception of the team he inherited over the summer to the one he’s come to know on the ice. “I think we’re really good and I didn’t know we were this good. Like, I’ve come here, the D corps is better, the goalies are better, the forwards are better. We have depth at every position.”
“I can roll out Bergeron’s line, offensively or defensively, to close out games,” said Montgomery, noting just one aspect of the good fortune he assumed over the summer. “And I can roll out Hampus Lindholm and Charlie McAvoy.”
