It’s getting to the time of year when the best players for the Boston Bruins need to step it up if they’re going to crash the Stanley Cup playoff party.
The B’s could only scratch for a pair of goals in the third period in a 4-2 loss to the San Jose Sharks on Thursday night, where they outshot the Sharks, but couldn’t finish off enough plays against a San Jose goalie in Alex Nedeljkovic, who admittedly played very well while making 39 saves for the Sharks.
“We were just looking for that one goal, and it just didn’t happen for maybe too long,” said Marco Sturm. “We know once we get one going, we get the crowd going and we can change the game. But for some reason it was a little off today and we weren’t sharp. We had early chances and couldn’t score, and that was the hockey game.”
But the game also continued a trend since the Olympic break, where Morgan Geekie and Elias Lindholmare among a number of key B’s players that haven’t fully found their games since the break. Some of that may be a sluggish return from a long NHL break, and some of it might be free ice simply becoming harder to come by as the games get more competitive in the final weeks with key points on the line.
But Geekie doesn’t have a single 5-on-5 point during six games in the month of March, and Lindholm has just a single 5-on-5 point in that same amount of time. Neither player cracked the score sheet in Thursday night’s loss, where they didn’t have enough offense, and both players were on the ice for a disastrous shorthanded Colin Graf goal after Lindholm lost the initial offensive zone faceoff.
COLLIN GRAF 🦈 The Massachusetts kid dashes in for a slick goal! pic.twitter.com/KwHxh7ABmP— NHL (@NHL) March 13, 2026
Once Sturm lost patience with his lines and switched Pastrnak to skating with Fraser Minten and Marat Khusnutdinov– and they immediately responded by scoring a goal – it was pretty clear he didn’t love what he was watching.
“I was just trying to get something going. I felt like all of the lines got stuck,” said Sturm. “I thought David [Pastrnak] had a little bit of something, and maybe he didn’t get enough help. That’s why I put [Fraser Minten] there and Khusnutdinov there to try to generate a little something.
“It was too flat for me today. Guys tried but at the end of the day it just wasn’t good enough. Top guys need to be your top guys and that’s why in those kinds of moments you need them even more. Unfortunately, we just didn’t really have it today.”
In total, the Bruins have scored 21 goals in the eight games since the Olympic break for a 2.63 goals per game average that’s well below the 3.29 goals per game that they’ve averaged this season. Certainly, that opens up some second-guessing for not getting more offensive help at the NHL trade deadline for a team that has overachieved offensively this season, but the bottom line is the Bruins simply need their key guys to perform as they did prior to the Olympic break.
Perhaps related to that is the power play going a little quiet in this post-Olympic stretch as well as the Black and Gold have just three PP goals in six games during the month of March, and went 0-for-2 in Thursday night’s loss while allowing a crippling shorthanded goal to Mass native Colin Graf at the start of the third period that essentially clinched the game for the Sharks.
Pastrnak has zero PP goals this month and just one PP point, while Pavel Zachaleads the team in power play goals (two) with Geekie holding the only other power play score.
“Obviously you can’t let in [the shorthanded] goal…it’s tough to be down by three goals,” said Elias Lindholm. “Today was not our day. We created some chances, but it was just too late. We knew sooner or later that we can’t win at home forever, and we need to figure things out on the road.
“Obviously [their goalie] played well. We had some [offensive] looks, but we could do a better job to be on the inside and be in his way a little bit more. Obviously, we haven’t scored too many goals lately.”
The question now is where the offense is going to come from on the road, where the Bruins have dropped seven games in a row and haven’t actually won a game away from home since January. Now the Bruins enter a key three-game road stretch with games in Washington, New Jersey and Montreal over the next week, knowing that they end their schedule with seven of their last 10 games on the road, including a pair of road games in Columbus against the Blue Jackets team closely chasing them in the standings.
Now would be a good time for their best players to start stepping up their offensive games, get the power play back to the top 5 special teams’ unit it’s been all season, and for the Bruins to stand up and claim the postseason spot waiting for them. The B’s bench boss has a great deal of experience as a player and a coach when it comes to playoff teams and what it takes to get there, and Sturm said he simply wants to see consistency across the board.
“Guys need to be healthy first of all and we are pretty good there, knock on wood,” said Sturm. “You need to be consistent. Not just as a [collective] team, but it could be goaltending, special teams, home and away. That’s something where we have to stay consistent with everything we do. When we do that, it automatically gives us a chance, just a chance.
“There will be some nights where it is tough nights like [tonight], so you don’t want to get too low during these tough months. If we can do that then I feel pretty good about this team.”
It might be tough to feel effusively positive about a Bruins team that’s struggling offensively after standing pat at the trade deadline, but they’ve also proven the doubters wrong all season. There’s reason to believe things are going to pick up both offensively, and on the road, for a group that still has something left in the tank.
