Penalty kill is vital to Bruins’ success

Just as he was as a participant Marco Sturm the coach is quick to smile and give off a positive vibe at least off the ice But if you re looking to furrow the new Bruins coach s brow speedily bring up his unit s penalty kill It concerned him back in the summer before he ever put whistle to mouth and it concerned just a scarce days ago as opening night looms It s no secret why The B s once a standard in the PK department fell to th in the NHL On top of that they traded away three players who had been stalwarts on the kill Brad Marchand Charlie Coyle and Brandon Carlo in the retool Considering the edge with which they want to play coupled with the fact this association will be challenged to total goals beyond David Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie having a strong PK is paramount to any success they hope to have Throughout camp Sturm has been holding open auditions for the PK We were short a little bit on killers so there s a limited guys Tanner Jeannot Casey Mittelstadt those guys Mikey Eyssimont one of them we need as a killer We might have to turn him into a killer explained Sturm who added on Monday that a big reason why John Beecher made the company was because of his PK prowess That s why we ve tried things out the last sparse games and we re going to continue with that because we re short on that Whoever does the best job will get the job that s for sure There are a couple of naturals for the job like Pavel Zacha and Elias Lindholm But more are needed Eyssimont displayed his prowess in it in the second preseason event at Madison Square Garden when shorthanded he stripped Ranger defenseman Adam Fox and scored a goal that spurred a comeback that would erase a three-goal deficit Another sportsman who has raised his hand emphatically is Jeannot who signed a five-year deal worth million per season He has not skated on the penalty kill in a couple of years and he s eager to get back on it It was a big part of my meeting in Nashville and it s something I m really looking forward to taking pride in noted the -year-old Jeannot It s one of the reasons why I needed to come here I thought there was going to be opportunity for me to be doing that again It s something that I just take a lot of of pride in and it gives you a lot of purpose on a group if you can have a PK and guys are confident and playing hard and you get a call against you that you can kill it off Every opportunity I get I want to make the most of of it When David Krejci was here he would often say that whenever he wasn t feeling the puck like he demanded to working on the PK would get him back on track The big physical Jeannot may be a different kind of athlete from the silk-mitted Krejci but the same concept is applicable For sure It gets you involved in a different way in the challenge announced Jeannot It s not necessarily an offensive-minded thing but you re getting out there and you re seeing the puck and the pace of play and you re just feeling into the championship It can definitely spark something When you re feeling more in the championship then you can be confident in other areas as well Jeannot has been paired a couple of times with Zacha and the duo created a -on- that Zacha couldn t convert in the shootout loss to Philadelphia at the Garden Zacha a regular on the PK since he arrived in Boston has liked the approach so far We ve had a lot of video sessions and it s good to have had a couple of reps in the games It invariably starts to get better when you get two guys reading off each other and get a couple of reps together so that we can communicate on the ice I think the systems that we re going to do this year is going to be really good noted Zacha We ve got chosen really strong defensemen still And I noticed we re going to rotate more guys into it so everybody stays fresh as forwards But that s one of the biggest parts of the championship If you get scored on with one or two goals a meeting in the penalty kill it s hard to win There s not a multitude of goals -on- anymore so we have to be better than last year I think we have really good players that we brought on in the offseason who can skate and read the competition so I think we have certain good options on the penalty kill One thing the B s don t really have yet or at least he s not yet been identified is a scoring threat on the PK When Marchand left so did his franchise-record shorthanded goals The danger of Marchand going the other way for a scoring chance especially when he was paired with Patrice Bergeron did wonders to make a power play just a hair tentative It s a huge help announced Zacha Mentally it s a big thing too If you have a couple of shorthanded goals in the season teams are a little more passive trying to pass through guys It s a mental contest if you can number a couple of goals Marchie was a big part of that But I think we have particular fast guys who figure goals It s a big advantage if you can outcome even if it s just once every couple of games It helps a lot But when petitioned how crucial it was for a PK to develop a scoring threat Sturm pulled the exigency brake highlighting how much he s still working on the foundation of this critical area of the match That s the next step I m not there yet We ve tweaked a sparse things on the PK so they have to get settled first and then we can talk more about that revealed Sturm Those Marchands the Bergerons they did it blindly It was unbelievable But they d been together for a long long time I feel like that s almost where we have to start to create those pairs again so that we get used to each other in every situation And we re just not there yet