The Hockey News has released its archive to all THN subscribers: 76 years of history, stories, and features.
Subscribe now to view the full THN Archives here
Also, go to thn.com/free to subscribe.
Bear Market - Dec. 1, 2022 - By Ken Campbell
IT’S A MORNING skate on a Saturday in Toronto, a venue that scientific researchers recently discovered is the most wonderful place to be in the hockey world. (Tied with Montreal.) But there’s a strange vibe in the Boston Bruins’ dressing room on this day. On one hand, the club is riding a seven-game winning streak, and the Bruins have established themselves as one of the best teams in the NHL, which should have everybody feeling pretty good about themselves. On the other, it’s the day after the team announced it had signed pariah-prospect Mitchell Miller to an entry-level contract, and, through absolutely no fault of their own, the Bruins players know they have some ’splaining to do.
Bruins captain Patrice Bergeron is strategically located in the corner of the dressing room that allows for best access. Brad Marchand is not far away. In another corner stands David Pastrnak, sartorially resplendent as ever, minus one of his signature large-brimmed hats. He explains that it’s been a long road trip and those beauties don’t travel particularly well. Everybody wants to know what Bergeron and Marchand think about the Miller signing, a transaction that began going sideways the moment it was announced. Nobody really needs to talk to Pastrnak about this, because he’s not a team spokesman. He’s not going to go on about the culture the Bruins have cultivated and how it took a hit with the Miller signing. He’s probably not going to talk about how disappointed he is that the Bruins made the move; Marchand and Bergeron and Nick Foligno are doing a good job of that themselves. Pastrnak is standing there pretty much because he’s scorched the NHL early in the season. Or as Foligno put it: “He’s driving the bus here, let’s be honest.”
Which is interesting, because he may actually have to double as the team’s bus driver in 2023-24 for what the Bruins are going to have to pay him if they aim to retain his services after this season. In the final year of a six-year deal worth $40 million, Pastrnak stands to become a 27-year-old unrestricted free agent this summer. It’s a pretty good group – Patrick Kane, Dylan Larkin, Bo Horvat, Ryan O’Reilly and Vladimir Tarasenko are also pending UFAs – but nobody would be coveted more than Pastrnak, a natural and gifted goal-scorer who can bury the puck from almost anywhere. His low maintenance and high production, combined with his age, will make him a very attractive target, particularly for a team needing an offensive game-breaker. The two sides have had preliminary discussions, and even though envisioning Pastrnak in a uniform other than Boston’s would require some adjustment time, there’s little doubt the Bruins will have to hit double-digits in the millions for the first time in club history in order to get a deal done. Seems pretty simple. Eight years times $10.5 million – the extension that will kick in for Jonathan Huberdeau with the Calgary Flames next season – sounds about right. But if Pastrnak keeps producing the way he did in the first part of the season, that number stands to go up, hometown discount notwithstanding. “We’ve had some initial talks, but there’s no timeline,” said Pastrnak’s agent, J.P. Barry. “I think David just wanted to keep playing for a while, and I’m sure it will spark up again soon. The team will come after me. I won’t have to chase them.”
Perhaps the most surprising – and from the Bruins’ standpoint, quite pleasant – aspect of all of this is that Pastrnak is doing his damage this season without the two linemates with whom he’d previously skated to form The Best Line in the World™. With his team down 3-0 to the Columbus Blue Jackets the night before Halloween in 2017, then-Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy tossed his lines into a blender and came up with the Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak combination. The three players were key to the Bruins tying the score 3-3 before losing in a shootout that night. And because Mrs. Cassidy didn’t raise no dummy, the coach kept the trio together, allowing them to develop into the most feared line in the NHL for the past half-decade. Bergeron and Marchand had always been a tandem, but in Pastrnak, they found a linemate who played with reckless abandon and kept seemingly doomed offensive plays alive and kicking. But one of the first things new coach Jim Montgomery did this season was take Pastrnak off the Bergeron-Marchand line, replacing him with Jake DeBrusk. He put Pastrnak on the second unit, with the repatriated David Krejci at center and former Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall at left wing. It gives the Bruins incredible depth in their top six and makes them far more difficult to defend.
Recent Bruins News
Bruins Reveal Roster For Preseason Opener
Former Bruins Forward Scores Awesome Michigan Goal
Bruins Exciting Prospect Is Dominating Right Now
Sturm's Subtle Tweaks Highlight Day Two Of Bruins Training Camp
Bruins Forward Loves Being Back In Boston
You might think there’d be a chance Pastrnak would get his shorts in a knot over losing his linemates, particularly in a contract year. But remember what we said about him being low maintenance? Pastrnak was on a 50-goal, 128-point pace without his usual coworkers, and, as with almost everything else in his life, he’s dealt with the change without complaint. It’s easy to smile when you’re producing the way Pastrnak has this season, but his demeanor has always had a lot to do with his success. “For me, it’s not very hard to adjust to other players, what they need from me,” he said. “And I really don’t have a problem to find chemistry with anybody, to be honest. I’ve always found a way to adjust to new players.”
The perma-smile that Pastrnak has been wearing pretty much since the beginning of his career is almost as renowned as his ability to score goals. Teammates have observed that he’s a player who’s not prone to going into long funks, because he never gets down on himself. There’s a very real confidence there, but it bubbles below the surface. Much of Pastrnak’s public persona is contradictory. He is effusive and engaging, but he doesn’t seek the spotlight, and he’s quite content to leave the talking to his teammates. His wardrobe is most definitely louder than he is. But there is both a youthful charm and a sense of optimism that people around him find contagious. Pastrnak and his fiancee, Rebecca Rohlsson, whom he met when he was playing in Sweden as a teenager, live in the same building as Foligno’s family, in Boston’s North End, walking distance to the TD Garden. Pastrnak often drops in to play mini-sticks with Foligno’s kids, with both the children and Pastrnak oblivious to Foligno’s presence. “My kids love him,” Foligno said. “My kid had a buddy over the other day, and ‘Pasta’ came down and was playing knee hockey with them, and the kid is looking at my son. My son has no clue, it’s just my dad’s friend, right? And the kid is like, ‘You have David Pastrnak in your house!’”
I LOVE BOSTON, THIS IS WHERE I’VE BECOME A MAN. THIS IS WHERE I GREW UP PRETTY MUCH, CAME HERE AS AN 18-YEAR-OLD KID– David Pastrnak
Even though it seems he has lived a charmed life, and much of it has been, life has not been without its challenges for Pastrnak. Picking up and leaving his family for Sweden at the age of 16 was excruciatingly difficult. Four days before Pastrnak’s 17th birthday, his father, Milan, died of cancer while Pastrnak was still in Sweden with Sodertalje’s under-20 team. Milan was only 51 years old. He had played professionally in both the Czech Republic and Germany, and he was a huge influence in his son’s life and hockey career. When Pastrnak was drafted in the first round, 25th overall, by the Bruins just over a year later at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, the first thing Pastrnak did after his name was announced was kiss his finger and point to the sky, then hug his mother, Marcela. An even more devastating tragedy befell Pastrnak and Rohlsson in the summer of 2021. That was when Rebecca gave birth to a boy, Viggo Rohl Pastrnak, who died six days later. “That hurt a lot, for both of them,” Barry said. “He might not show it to people, and I’m sure it still hurts, but it hurt a lot for a year.”
Support systems are so important at times like that, and Pastrnak had a strong one with his teammates and his organization. It’s not a stretch to suggest that if you revisited the 2014 NHL draft, Pastrnak would challenge Aaron Ekblad and Leon Draisaitl for first overall. And there’s a pretty good chance Brayden Point would be in that mix as well. But Pastrnak fell to the Bruins at No. 25, in part because he missed a significant chunk of the 2013-14 season with a back injury. If Florida had taken Draisaitl first and Buffalo grabbed Pastrnak second, who knows how things would have worked out for him. To be sure, things have gone exceedingly well for Pastrnak in Boston, and the two have been a great fit together. At 18, Pastrnak came to a team that had all kinds of veteran character and a bunch of guys who could counsel a young man on being a good pro. The union with Bergeron and Marchand worked out incredibly well, but Pastrnak likely deserves as much credit for that as his linemates do. That’s probably why it would seem so strange and be so difficult for Pastrnak to leave the Bruins after this season.
When you think of the greatest right wingers in Bruins history, Pastrnak’s boss, team president Cam Neely, is probably the first player who comes to mind. Rick Middleton was brilliant and underappreciated; Ken Hodge twice scored 100 points; and Bobby Bauer played the right side of the famed ‘Kraut Line,’ where he won two Stanley Cups and three Lady Byng Trophies in a career that was interrupted by his service in the Second World War. Dit Clapper forged most of his Hall of Fame credentials as a defenseman, but, prior to moving to the blueline, he was an elite right winger, who scored 41 goals in 44 games in 1929-30. Neely, Clapper and Bauer are in the Hall of Fame. Pastrnak is fourth among that group in franchise scoring. Before this season ends, he stands a good chance of surpassing Neely’s 590 points as a Bruin. Middleton (898 points) and Hodge (674) are still in the distance, but if Pastrnak were to stay healthy – and stay long-term in the only NHL home he has ever known – he would stand an excellent chance of passing all of them.
HE HAS THAT DRIVE, AND I THINK THAT’S WHY YOU SEE HIM CONTINUALLY GET BETTER AND BETTER. AND HE’S A GENERATIONAL TYPE OF TALENT. HIS WORK ETHIC IS INSANE– Brad Marchand
“I love Boston,” Pastrnak said. “This is where I’ve become a man. This is where I grew up pretty much, came here as an 18-year-old kid. Boston is my second home, besides my hometown. It has a special place in my heart, and I’m very thankful for the situation that I was put into.” You might be surprised to find out what – aside from hockey, of couse – Pastrnak likes so much about Boston. But perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, considering Boston’s rich colonial history. “It reminds me a lot of a European city,” he said. “It’s very clean, a bunch of nice restaurants. The European touch of that city is probably the biggest factor. It feels like home.”
That doesn’t sound like a guy who’s champing at the bit to sign elsewhere, but a 26-year-old – he turns 27 in May – coming off a possible 100-point season is going to get paid, and paid big. And it also must be considered that Pastrnak may not have hit his peak. Several teammates have remarked he’s actually getting better. He’s scoring from more areas of the ice, and his dogged determination has not been dulled. He has had some problems staying healthy for full seasons, and that might be a red flag, but as far as goal-scorers are concerned, Pastrnak is among the most productive players in his age group. The 2015-16 season was the first full NHL campaign for both Pastrnak and Draisaitl, and it was also Connor McDavid’s rookie year, with Auston Matthews entering the league a season later. Since that season, Matthews has been a beast, with 259 goals entering the 2022-23 campaign, seven more than Draisaitl, despite playing one fewer season. McDavid checks in at 239 goals, with Pastrnak registering 230. They were all in arrears of cyborg Alex Ovechkin’s 305 goals, and Pastrnak was five behind teammate Marchand, but his production has been consistently high. Pastrnak was robbed of a 50-goal season when the pandemic cut short the 2019-20 campaign – the one in which he shared the Rocket Richard Trophy with Ovechkin.
The way Marchand sees it, Pastrnak will be a productive player for a long time, just the way he is. And the main reason for that is Pastrnak is one of those sublimely gifted players who refuses to rely solely on his talent, an ethos instilled in him by his father. “Where you tend to see superstars get comfortable is when it comes easily to them, and their work ethic isn’t where it needs to be,” said Marchand, himself something of an expert on talent and determination. “He has that drive, and I think that’s why you see him continually get better and better. And he’s a generational type of talent. His work ethic is insane, and when you have that like he does, you have guys who can sustain it until they’re 35-plus.”
That would give Pastrnak an awfully long time to make his mark on the game. Foligno is among those who believe even Pastrnak isn’t aware of how good he is and how many people are watching him. The awesome suits and the highlight-reel goals are what everyone sees on the outside, but on the inside, there is a fierce competitor who wants to succeed and knows he can if he stays hungry and healthy. His teammates see it, and they appreciate it. “I didn’t know how mature he was off the ice,” Foligno said. “You see the flashiness, and you might think it’s just all about that. It couldn’t be more opposite with David, and that’s what appealed to me. Seeing the way he’s playing now, he’s a guy who’s understanding of himself as a human now. It’s really cool. You get to that age and you’ve been in the league for a while and now he’s starting to understand his place in this league, on this team, his role, and it’s just coming out now in the way he’s playing. He’s just so confident, so free, he’s trusting his instincts.”
It’s interesting because even though Pastrnak is technically on the Bruins’ second line and away from Bergeron and Marchand, he was averaging more ice time per game this season than he has in any other. A 50-goal campaign is a real possibility, and it might not be his last. Despite his goal-scoring prowess, Pastrnak never thought of himself as a 50-goal guy – and certainly not a guy who would contend for the Rocket Richard – until his monster season in 2019-20. But that has changed, and early in the season, he was on pace for about 423 shots, which would far surpass his career high – set last season – of 312. “I’m getting a lot of opportunities and ice time, so I’m confident,” he said. “If I’m healthy, I know what I can do out there. I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s still early in the season, but I know myself. And if I stay healthy, I know I can keep this up and be better every game."