Pastrnak, Bruins seek to regain touch on power play

BOSTON -- David Pastrnak can hear you.

Just as he hears the cheers, the chants of “Let’s go Bruins,” the screams and the boos, he also hears the calls to shoot the puck. He’s a human, ears and all. And sometimes, even as he and his fellow players on the Boston Bruins’ top power-play unit know when there is a lane and when there isn’t, even as they understand that there are times to shoot and times not to, those shouts impact him.

“Fans start screaming, ‘Shoot the puck,’ right? So you force a shot and it gets turned over, then you’re breaking the puck out, and some nights you can’t even get in the zone,” Pastrnak told NHL.com this week at TD Garden. “It’s a big mental thing. We’ve got to be confident, we are there, in the unit, for a reason. We are the best players on the team, that’s why we are rewarded with [the] power play. We have to go out there and be confident and make plays.”

But this season, right now, they’re not.

And though he’s not sure if other players can hear those shouts, if they pay attention, he knows he can and does. Which he does understand. He gets the emotions that cause the desire to shout; he feels like that at times when attending soccer games, when he wants his favorites to shoot the ball.

Still, as he said, “I’m not a big fan of that.

“Because the fans are a big part. They are a seventh player on the ice. It can count sometimes for stuff, when you hear the boos. We know the power play is not going well. We deserve it, obviously.

“But you can definitely hear that, for sure. Same like when you are going well and they are cheering you on.”

For the Bruins (20-19-5), right now, so much is not going right. They have lost six straight games and their position in the Atlantic Division has become increasingly tenuous. They have gone eight games without a power-play goal, last scoring one Dec. 23 against the Washington Capitals, and are 0-for-13 since that game.

They will get a chance to turn that around Saturday when they visit one of their fiercest rivals, the Florida Panthers, the team that knocked them out of the Stanley Cup Playoffs each of the past two seasons, at Amerant Bank Arena (1 p.m. ET; ABC, ESPN+, SN).

The Bruins are 31st in the NHL in power-play percentage at 12.2 percent, a far cry from the 22.2 percent (14th) of last season. Pastrnak has eight points (four goals, four assists) on the man-advantage and has two assists on the power play since Dec. 10, his last coming Dec. 21.

“It’s got to the point where it’s only normal for us to not have the same confidence as we would have in October or opening night,” Pastrnak said. “Unfortunately, it drags too long and we are not good enough. So it’s only human to not feel comfortable out there.”

It’s just part of a season that has gone wrong in many ways for the Bruins, starting with the lack of scoring from their entire team, including Pastrnak. The forward has 42 points (17 goals, 25 assists) in 44 games after getting 113 points (61 goals, 52 assists) in 82 games in 2022-23 and 110 points (47 goals, 63 assists) in 82 games last season.

The Bruins as a whole are 29th in the NHL in goals per game (2.55) after finishing tied with the Vegas Golden Knights for 13th last season (3.21).

In the past, when Pastrnak would go through a scoring drought, he would be able to rely on the power play to get back his feel, his belief.

“You don’t have to score every time,” he said, “but you get the looks, you get the puck touches, you have the puck on your stick, you feel comfortable with it because you have it for 30, 40 seconds in power play on your stick, so you feel comfortable.

“And this year, unfortunately, our power play is not doing the job and we’re not getting the momentum.”

There’s an understanding that, in the NHL, it is difficult to score 5-on-5. That’s where the power play comes in, almost like a breath of fresh air, a mental release, an easier path to the goal.

Not this season. Not for the Bruins.

“I really want the power play to be clicking, and we are just not doing the job right now,” he said.

It was not that long ago, in 2019-20, when the Bruins’ power play ranked second in the NHL (25.2 percent), when they’d go into the man-advantage and just know they were going to score.

That’s not the case anymore, not without Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci and the chemistry that kept them at the top of the League. But they know they can score. The dam just needs to break.

“Everybody who is on the power play has done it in their past,” Pastrnak said. “We just need to find that switch and get confident again.”

Pastrnak is trending up. He said he’s been feeling better since returning from the holiday break, and he has seven points (five goals, two assists) in the eight games since then, including back-to-back two-goal games last weekend.

“Like any goal-scorer, once you start scoring, you feel good about yourself and you gain that confidence,” interim coach Joe Sacco said, “and that’s what he is, he’s a goal-scorer.”

Pastrnak, though, knows he needs to be even better. He also knows it’s not that simple.

“You go through phases always when it’s going good and when it’s not,” Pastrnak said. “Obviously staying healthy is very important because I know what I can do when I’m 100 percent healthy and sometimes you’re not lucky with that.

“I’m not saying I’ve hurt the whole season, but I definitely haven’t been healthy all season either.”

Pastrnak said he got off to a good start in his offseason training, beginning earlier than usual because of his impending wedding. He had been feeling something was off in the playoffs last season but said that injury was fixed by doctors at the 2024 IIHF World Championship in May, where he scored the third-period game-winner to give the gold to Czechia.

When he resumed his training, it went well for a few weeks before he aggravated the injury.

By the time Bruins training camp came around in September, he was better, he said. And, he emphasized, what he has been dealing with this season is unrelated to the injury from the playoffs.

It is now halfway through the NHL season, with the playoffs starting to come into view. That’s where his focus has turned, to getting to the playoffs, a place and the Bruins have reached in each of the past eight seasons.

Pastrnak remembers the Bruins struggling like this back in 2015-16, his second season, but in a vague way. Then, he was 20 years old, still trying to hold on to a spot in the lineup. He was not relied upon, as a scorer, as a leader, as a piece of the solution.

“You’re young, you’re just worrying about staying on the team, so you don’t think the way I think now,” he said. “[Now], you’re thinking about winning, you’re not thinking about staying on the team. You have different responsibilities. It was definitely hard, never been through something like this so far as I became older and became a leader.

“But I think we’ve come a very long way from where we were in October.”