Boston Bruins coach Jim Montgomery reunited Charlie Coyle with Trent Frederic on the third line against the San Jose Sharks on Thursday. The results were promising.
Long before the Boston Bruins entered the ‘Shark Tank’ in San Jose’s SAP Center on Thursday, the team had its pitch to replace the retired Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci as the top centers.
Charlie Coyle, the previous staple at 3C, got a chance to fill out the top six between Brad Marchand and Jake DeBrusk. In the first two games, that line combination failed to record a point together. ‘For that reason, I’m out.’
Entering the third game of the season, Coyle shifted back to the third line with Trent Frederic and James van Riemsdyk, with 19-year-old Matt Poitras elevated to the top six.
"All [Coyle] cares about is winning, whatever he can do to back the team to win," Montgomery told reporters in San Jose on Wednesday. "His game doesn't change whether I use him with Marchand or whether I'm using him with Frederic."
It looks like a demotion, but in this case, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
Reunited with Frederic, whom he played on the same line with for a total of 524:16 last season, Coyle clicked with him right away in the 3-1 win.
Starting the game for Boston, they tipped the ice immediately. Frederic put a backhand shot on goal just 17 seconds into the game, then followed up his own attempt two seconds later. Soon after, Coyle fired off a wrister at the 0:37 mark. Not even a minute into the game, and the Bruins led the shot count 3-0.
They didn’t convert, but it signaled things to come. After 18 minutes, Brad Marchand finally got Boston on the board, with Johnny Beecher earning his first NHL point on the assist. Just 19 seconds later, the third line got into the action again.
Coyle skated in, cycled behind the net and drew in Sharks defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic before sending the puck into the middle, where Frederic and van Riemsdyk put a few whacks on the puck before the latter pushed it through, quickly giving the Bruins a 2-0 lead.
As a whole, the Coyle line outshot the Sharks 10-0 in the first period, and Frederic alone had five of them.
“We gotta be around that net,” Coyle told NESN’s Adam Pellerin during the first intermission. “‘Freddy’ and ‘Reemer’ both hit me in the middle with speed, and whether we get in clean or not, we get it in, we go to work. We pressure them, they turn it over. We make plays, we get it to the net.
“That’s kind of us in a nutshell. That’s how we got to be, and we get rewarded for it right away.”
Boston Bruins vs. San Jose Sharks Offensive Zone Heat Maps through the first period on Oct. 19, 2023 (via Natural Stat Trick) Through 20 minutes, the Bruins were getting chances close to the net while neutralizing San Jose on the opposite end, and by the time the Sharks started to look dangerous, it was too late.
Jim Montgomery was reportedly not happy with the effort at practice on Wednesday and Thursday. Perhaps in preparing for a rebuilding opponent like San Jose, the team felt it wouldn’t take much to get by with a win.
There may be a point there – David Pastrnak practically sleep-walked into his fourth goal of the season to put the Bruins up 3-0 late in the second period – but it was not all a walk in the park.
Both the Marchand-Poitras-Geekie and Lucic-Beecher-Lauko lines struggled, each getting outshot by San Jose when they were on the ice at 5-on-5. The Poitras line was on for Anthony Duclair’s goal that spoiled the shutout.
Not surprisingly, Montgomery shuffled the lines a bit, as he’s prone to do in the latter stages of most games. He swapped Marchand and Jake DeBrusk at one point, and moved Morgan Geekie to center Marchand and Pastrnak at another. However, Coyle’s line was largely left untouched.
Chances are we’ll see Montgomery shuffle the lines yet again as he sorts out a more permanent combination, but until they prove otherwise, the van Riemsdyk-Coyle-Frederic line is worth the Bruins’ investment.