When Boston Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery challenged his superstar winger David Pastrnak in his post-Game 6 press conference, it was not the first time he had done so.
Following Game 6 on Thursday night, Montgomery didn’t hold back when asked if he needed more execution from team captain Brad Marchand and Pastrnak.
“Your best players need to be your best players this time of year,” Montgomery replied. “I think the effort is tremendous, but they need to come through with some big-time plays in big-time moments. Marchand has done that in this series; ‘Pasta needs to step up.”
A few questions later, Montgomery was again asked about David Pastrnak, who has just two goals and two assists in six games in the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“He needs to be a dominant player like he used to. He’s doing it in flurries, but not as consistently,” Montgomery said of his struggling star winger, who finished the regular season with 47 goals and 63 assists in 82 games.
After the Boston Bruins team plane touched down in Boston on Friday afternoon, Montgomery and veteran center Charlie Coyle addressed reporters at Hanscom Field in Bedford, MA. Montgomery was asked how Pastrnak took the challenge.
“I talked to him right after the game about it. I talked to him about it during the game,” Montgomery told reporters. “Pasta and I have a real healthy, communicative relationship, and he’s ready to go.”
While Pastrnak can definitely ‘step up’ and be better offensively, it would surely help the Boston Bruins if Coyle and fellow center Pavel Zacha, who usually plays on Pastrnak’s line, stepped up more. One specific area that needs to improve is faceoffs, and Coyle elaborated on what has arguably been the Bruins’ most glaring deficiency in the series. The Bruins were 20-for-34 at the dot in Game 6.
“We can always be better there as a centerman, and you have your wingers there to help, too,” Coyle told the media. “That’s the first battle of any shift, and we gotta take a little more initiative to win those and fight for those and tie up if we have to, but it’s all five guys out there at that point, but as the centermen we gotta take ownership and really battle because they do a good job on faceoffs. So, that’s one area where we can definitely get better at.”
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