The Boston Bruins have completed their first 10 games of the 2024-25 season and it has not been the start the fans nor the team have become accustomed to. It has been an up-and-down start to the season with the team unable to string together two wins in a row yet or really build any momentum.
Related: Bruins Need to Put Matthew Poitras on the Best Line for his Development
It is certainly not time to panic yet as there are still 72 games left to be played and I fully believe that a lot of their issues are fixable. They currently have a record of 4-5-1. While having a slow start is unfamiliar for many on the Bruins’ roster, it could be a good thing in the end to have their struggles now rather than in the postseason like they have the past two seasons.
It hasn’t been the start to the season that anyone would have predicted, but the first 10 games have cemented a few noticeable trends with the Bruins and generated some notable takeaways.
Fourth Line Is Early MVP of the Season
I will be the first to say that I was not a fan of the Linus Ullmark trade at the beginning of the offseason, but so far, it has worked out much better than expected. Joonas Korpisalo has been fine as a backup, and was particularly good against the Philadelphia Flyers on Oct. 29. But the real star of that trade for the Bruins so far has been Mark Kastelic, who along with Cole Koepke and Johnny Beecher has been part of the team’s most productive line early this season.
Through 10 games, the fourth line has 19 points and all three players are on pace to set career highs in games, goals, assists, and overall points. Kastelic currently sits at three goals and six points in 10 games with his previous high being five goals and 10 points in 63 games. Koepke had one goal and three total points in 26 NHL games prior to the 2024-25 season and now has three goals and seven points in 10 games. Beecher has successfully avoided a sophomore slump so far in his second season with two goals and six points.
In comparison, all three guys on the fourth line currently have more points than Elias Lindholm, Pavel Zacha, Trent Frederic, Charlie Coyle, and Morgan Geekie, all of whom were expected to be huge impact players this season while there were questions if any of the three fourth-liners would even make the Bruins’ roster out of training camp.
There was even a point early in this season where the argument could be made that they weren’t just the best line on the Bruins, but in the whole NHL. The three of them have spent 73 minutes of time on ice playing together and in that stretch, the Bruins have scored nine goals while only allowing their opponents one.
It’s not just the analytics saying that this line is good though. In almost every Bruins game so far this season, they have looked like the best players on the ice. The team is visibly better and more energetic. They have been Boston’s best line and it isn’t even close.
Top Players Need to Step Up
On the flip side of the excellent play of the fourth-line guys, it needs to be said that the Bruins’ top players haven’t quite lived up to expectations in the first 10 games of the season. Head coach Jim Montgomery has tried a number of line combinations, and nothing really seems to be gelling and many of the top guys are struggling. Coyle, who is coming off of a career-best season in 2023-24, only has one goal this season while Geekie, someone who the front office was looking into a possible extension prior to the start of the season, has only one assist in nine games.
Even David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand, who currently sit at one and three on the scoring chart for the team (Koepke is number two), haven’t looked to be in top form. Pastrnak has six goals and eight points in 10 games, but has been largely a non-factor in games. Marchand has six points, but only one of them is a goal. They have both come up big when it matters most as they each have an overtime-winning goal so far, but neither has looked as good as they can or should.
It’s not just the forwards either. The defense has been rough through the first 10 games. They are generating more offense from the blue line than they have in previous seasons, but when it comes to actually defending, they aren’t giving much help to Jeremy Swayman or Korpisalo in goal.
It shows when you look at the plus/minus. While it isn’t the perfect analytic and doesn’t always take into consideration all relevant information, it does tell us the important information of whether or not a team either scores more or lets in more goals when a certain player is on the ice. Most of the Bruins roster are currently a minus, including the majority of the blue line. Charlie McAvoy, who has a career plus-142, is a minus-2. Brandon Carlo, a career plus-125, is also sitting at minus-2. The only positive defenseman is Nikita Zadorov. He’s joined by the fourth line as the only four Boston players currently in the plus category.
The majority of the Bruins roster is underperforming right now. Montgomery needs to figure out the lines, and the players need to shake out of whatever funk they’ve been in to start the season. This roster is better than the borderline anemic play they’ve demonstrated in a number of their games so far.
Discipline Discipline Discipline
The Bruins are currently second in the league for penalty minutes at the moment, trailing only the Philadelphia Flyers, and it is really killing them. While they are one of the top teams in taking penalties, they are not as dominant when a man down as they have been in previous seasons. They currently rank 14th in the league on the penalty kill with an 80% success rate. They cannot win games when taking this many penalties. They give their opponents easy opportunities to get ahead or to stay competitive longer than they should, like they did against the Avalanche.
While Zadorov may be one of the few ‘plus’ players, he is also the most penalized Bruin with 21 penalty minutes, seven more than Pastrnak and McAvoy who are tied for second with 14. Pastrnak, whose career high in PIM is 47, is currently on pace for over 100.
This is an undisciplined team. Penalties are inevitable, and will happen in a hockey game. But the Bruins are too talented to be taking the amount that they are and do not have a strong enough penalty kill at the moment to weather the barrage of penalties they take each game.
Discipline is important and a difference-maker. In the first 10 games, their penalties are killing them and if they want to overcome their slow start, cleaning up their play will go a long way in doing so.
Special Teams Need to Improve
As mentioned above, the Bruins are currently 14th in the league on the penalty kill. For the past few seasons, this has been an area of strength for the team. They finished last season seventh in the league (82.5%), first in 2022-23 (87.3%), and ninth in 2021-22 (81.3%).
The powerplay on the other hand has been an area of concern for the past several seasons and those worries continue through the first 10 games of the 2024-25 season. One just had to watch their game against the Flyers to see how things are not clicking. At one point in that game, they had 1:40 of 5-on-3 play and still couldn’t convert. This season they are only converting on 14.3% of powerplay opportunities, good for 25th in the league. In the three previous seasons, they finished 15th in 2021-22 (21.2%), 12th in 2022-23 (22.2%), and 14th in 2023-24 (22.2%).
It has not been a good opening stretch for either the penalty kill or the powerplay. With the personnel they have, the Bruins should be better, particularly on the powerplay where they need to focus on actually getting shots off and not just continuously passing it back and forth with each other.
Moving Forward With 2024-25
While it isn’t time to panic, the Bruins do need to have some urgency in addressing their issues. This is a competitive league, and on top of that, Boston is in a competitive division with the reigning Stanley Cup champions, the Florida Panthers, and the always difficult-to-play Toronto Maple Leafs and Tampa Bay Lightning. They don’t want to lose too much ground early and be fighting in the spring to get back towards the top of the division.
Related: Latest on Marchand’s Contract Status With Bruins
This is a roster that should be better than how they played in the first 10 games of the season. American Thanksgiving at the end of November is typically a good evaluation time of how competitive a team actually is. This gives the Bruins four weeks to get themselves together. They’ll play 14 games between now and Thanksgiving, giving them ample opportunities to right the ship and get back to playing to their full potential.
