Marco Sturm may be nearing the point where he has to break up Boston’s forward group and start over.
The Bruins’ top six has looked out of sync for much of this stretch, and Thursday’s 4-1 loss in St. Louis only sharpened that problem. Boston opened the night with a goal from its third line, but the rest of the attack never found a real groove over the full 60 minutes.
That early spark came from James Hagens, Elias Lindholm, and Casey Mittelstadt, who made a quick impact 5:28 into the game. Mittelstadt picked off a Joel Hofer pass and sent the puck into dangerous ice, where Hagens redirected it between his legs for his fifth goal and 10th point in 14 games this season.
That trio has given Boston something real to build on. In 91 minutes together at 5-on-5, the Mittelstadt-Lindholm-Hagens line has outscored opponents 5-1, even though only 41.1 percent of their faceoffs have started in the offensive zone. Right now, Sturm appears to have found a legitimate shutdown unit in that group.
The same can’t be said for the Bruins’ big-name scoring lines.
Boston has largely kept David Pastrnak, Pavel Zacha, and JJ Peterka together on the top line, while Morgan Geekie has been moved down alongside Fraser Minten and Marat Khusnutdinov. The returns have been rough, especially during an 0-2 road trip that ended with the St. Louis loss.
“This league humbles you quick when you’re not doing the right things, and we kind of saw it go into effect tonight. I think we had some moments in the game, but over 60 minutes, too many mistakes and we got punished,” Hampus Lindholm said. “It’s a tough one to see slip away, but sometimes you have to learn from games like this and make it be a lesson coming down the line of the season here.”
The Peterka-Zacha-Pastrnak combination still hasn’t delivered the offensive punch Boston expected, and the Geekie-Minten-Khusnutdinov trio has looked like a poor fit.
At 5-on-5, the Zacha line has produced some positive results, outscoring opponents 4-2 in 62 minutes together. But three of those goals came in Boston’s 6-0 win over Nashville last week, and the Bruins were also outshot 33-22 in those minutes.
The numbers looked uglier in Tuesday’s 2-1 loss to Carolina. Against the Hurricanes’ top line, the Peterka-Zacha-Pastrnak group was on the wrong end of a 15-4 shot-attempt margin. Minten’s line had an even harder night, with Carolina’s second line of Nikolaj Ehlers, Jackson Blake, and Logan Stankoven posting a 16-0 shot-attempt edge during 7:07 of 5-on-5 time.
So far, the Khusnutdinov-Minten-Geekie line has barely generated anything. Boston has scored once and allowed one goal in 44:24 of 5-on-5 ice time with that trio.
Sturm tried to tinker with the top six in the third period Thursday, but the adjustment came too late to change the outcome. With Chicago coming to TD Garden for a Saturday matinee, the Bruins coach may need to make a bigger move from the opening faceoff.
One obvious option would be sliding Peterka back with Minten and Khusnutdinov, a trio that produced five 5-on-5 goals and allowed two in 38:12 together earlier this season. Sturm could also go further and reunite Pastrnak with Minten and Khusnutdinov, a combination that outscored opponents 15-6 in 188 minutes last season.
No matter how he arranges it, the message is clear: Boston’s top scorers have not been good enough.
Geekie has just one goal in 14 games, and 13 Bruins have more 5-on-5 points than Zacha’s three.
“It was creeping in. Even the games we won lately, in the end, we were just sloppy, I would say.
It finally caught up to us a little bit on this road trip,” Sturm said. “You just can’t play that way.
Maybe we needed it. Hopefully it’s going to be a bit of a wake-up call for us.
Just got to move on.”
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