Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Bruins coach to power-play critics: Don’t worry about it

Claude Julien

If there’s one area of their game that the Boston Bruins need to improve upon going into Monday’s contest against the Carolina Hurricanes, it’s their power play.

Through four games, Boston has converted on just one of 17 opportunities with the man advantage and have squandered entire two-minute stints without managing a single shot on goal.

Still, Bruins coach Claude Julien isn’t buying into the argument that this is a major cause for concern. If anything, he’s more annoyed that he keeps getting asked about it.

“I thought I’d be able to get away for at least one day without a power play question,” said Julien in a CSN New England. “The results haven’t been there, but I’d say in three of the four games that we moved the puck well, we hit a post and we had a goal disallowed. A lot of stuff has happened.”

His argument runs deeper than that though. He pointed out that the Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup last season despite their power-play struggles (the Kings ranked 12th in the playoffs with a 12.8% success rate) and, for that matter, the Bruins won it all in 2011 while faring even worse than the Kings in that regard (Boston converted on just 11.4% of power-play opportunities in 2011).

“We want it to work well, but it’s not the end of the world,” Julien added. “We’re still winning hockey games.”

The Bruins are 3-0-1. As long as they keep excelling in five-on-five situations, it will be easy for Julien to continue to shrug off those kind of criticisms.