The 27-year-old has just four goals in 29 games this season, outdone by seven teammates despite averaging more than 17 minutes per game.
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The numbers haven’t looked good for Jake DeBrusk. In the thick of his seventh NHL season, the Bruins winger is paid first and foremost to score goals, because, well, that’s what scorers are paid to do. That’s why DeBrusk makes $4 million a year.
After Tuesday night’s
4-3 overtime loss to the Wild at TD Garden, however, the 27-year-old DeBrusk hasa mere four goals in 29 games. Not nearly good enough for a guy who lines up most nights with the club’s most talented and productive forwards and averages just over 17 minutes of ice time.
Four goals. For one of the league’s fastest skaters. For a guy who last season equaled his career high for goals (27) and established a career high in points (50).
Where’d that Jake DeBrusk go?
As of Tuesday morning, 267 NHLers — an average of more than eight per team — had more goals than DeBrusk. Seven Bruinshad more than four , including rookie pivot Matt Poitras (five), who boarded a flight Monday night to play in the World Junior Championship.
By coach Jim Montgomery’s eye, what he’s seeing from DeBrusk is not all bad. The second-year Bruins bench boss believes in the power of positivity.
Montgomery would find some redeemable touch in the hands that Venus de Milo lost. It’s why guys like playing for him. The ugly is just the starting point of beauty in Monty’s world. It’s why he’s here in the wake of Bruce Cassidy, whose public player evaluations were, shall we say, decidedly blunter and edgier.
“Umm,” Montgomery mused Tuesday morning when asked if he felt DeBrusk was using his best asset, speed, to create opportunities or if DeBrusk simply was fighting the puck. “I don’t think he’s, uhhh . . . I will say that I thought last game was one of his better games of the year — as far as his habits and details. And I thought it translated with some of the [scoring] looks that he got.”
DeBrusk went 0-0–0 on Saturday during the 17:19 he logged against the Rangers. He landed four shots on net, one below his season high, so he was at least “around it,” in hockey parlance.
When he’s flying, legs in full roadrunner mode, darting in off either wing, DeBrusk can be a legit scoring threat and menace off the rush. He is not, though, one to manufacture goals down low. Staking out a piece of ice and pushing his way to the front isn’t his game.
If he could add some feisty, sandpaper presence to his game, DeBrusk might not see protracted goal droughts such as his current one or the eight-game slump to start this season (0-3–3, 15 shots on net).
Truth is, more than 400 regular-season games into his career, it’s fair to assume the DeBrusk die has been cast. He’ll get his goals his way or not at all, and this season, it’s mostly been not at all.
He once more logged 0-0–0 and landed but one shot
in 17:01 vs. the Wild. Worse, his last shift set up the Wild’s OT winner. DeBrusk fired wide from the left circle with 2:13 to go, leading directly to Minnesota’s three-on-one rush up the opposite wing. All of 0:07 after DeBrusk’s misfire, Kirill Kaprizov finished off the gimme rush with the game-winner. Ouch.
“Gotta get that on net,” said Montgomery. “And I don’t like the shot selection … and I don’t like both guys [DeBrusk and Charlie Coyle] going to the net all the way to the goal line. That’s what gives up the three on one the other way.”
Somewhere recently, though, Montgomery saw DeBrusk in the right time and place, puck on his stick, cutting toward the net.
“I thought for sure he was going to wire it,” the coach recalled. “Last game? Or two games ago? I’m not sure. But it was the off wing and he came down, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a really good shot.’ And he didn’t shoot it . . . I think he thought. And when you think, in that split second, the opening to shoot is gone.”
The season’s midpoint is fast approaching. DeBrusk needs to score. Whether the issue is his legs, his hands, or a mind that thinks too much (or too little in the case of the OT miscue), the numbers are adding up to a bad season.
