"You could see he wasn't at top speed," Boston coach Bruce Cassidy said Wednesday.
The forward scored 10 points in 10 postseason games (three goals, seven assists) after he had 95 during the regular season, including 48 goals, which tied him with Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin for the most in the NHL.
The Bruins, who rely heavily on their top line of Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand, scored 2.23 goals per game in the postseason after averaging 3.24 during the regular season. They were eliminated in five games from the best-of-7 Eastern Conference Second Round by the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Pastrnak missed Games 2, 3 and 4 of the first-round series against the Carolina Hurricanes, won by the Bruins in five games, because of the lower-body injury.
Pastrnak practiced once during training camp in July. He went home to the Czech Republic after the NHL paused the season March 12 due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus and missed the first two days of camp because he was required to quarantine after returning from Europe. He and fellow Czech forward Ondrej Kase, who also returned to Boston from Europe, had to complete a second quarantine after they practiced at a local rink unrelated to team activities.
"Obviously, missing him, him and Kase, their conditioning level wasn't where it needed to be to stand the rigors of that," Cassidy said. "And that was a bit of circumstance. Typically, you have the whole year to build that up if you miss a bit at the start. We didn't have that luxury this year."
Pastrnak did not score a point in the round-robin portion of the Stanley Cup Qualifiers, when the Bruins lost all three games to drop from the No. 1 seed in the East to No. 4. He scored four points (one goal, three assists) in two games against the Hurricanes and six points (two goals, four assists) in five games against the Lightning, including a goal in Game 5.
