A coach publicly shamed his team, Washington continues to struggle with Canada’s capital, and a No. 1 goaltender is losing his grip on the crease.
Here are four things we learned in the NHL Tuesday.
Remember Pastrnak?
David Pastrnak: early-season hero, mid-season disappointment.
The 20-year-old Boston Bruins forward had 19 goals in his first 26 games this year and even had four points in the first game of the season. Only he’s recently gone cold. Ice cold.
Before he finally got off the schneid Tuesday night with an overtime winner against the Detroit Red Wings (and a real nice one, at that), he had previously gone 17 games without a goal.
It had been so long that he’d lost touch with the reporters who used to frequent his dressing room stall after games.
Though the young winger did have a six-game stretch without a single point between late December and early January, he also put together a string of eight assists over his previous 10 games.
If you had him in fantasy, you should have dealt him by now.
Gulutzan burns Flames
As the Bruins escaped with a win Tuesday, it was another coach not named Claude Julien who was hot under the collar.
After the Calgary Flames got blasted 5-1 by the Montreal Canadiens — their fourth straight loss — head coach Glen Gulutzan ripped his team for its recent play.
And it wasn’t just the Flames’ fourth straight loss. It was the fourth straight game in which they trailed 4-0 at one point in the contest.
Gulutzan called it a “pathetic display.”
“[We’ve] just got to man up,” he said after the game. “I mean, we play well and one bad thing happens and we crumple. Everybody talks about our starts; our starts have been good but one little shot goes in, we crumple. We just crumple. We have no resolve to stay with it; we have to look internally here at ourselves – everybody, everybody in the organization – and see how we’re going to pull ourselves out because the league doesn’t feel sorry for you.
“[What] bugs me most is we play when it’s easy… If you got that mentality, you got to fight out of it.”
Flames forward Kris Versteeg felt similarly.
Calgary is barely holding on to the last playoff spot in the Western Conference with the Los Angeles Kings one point behind with three games in hand.
Sens have Caps’ number
Even though the Washington Capitals have defeated the Ottawa Senators in two of three meetings this month, they just can’t seem to score much at all.
Ottawa blanked Washington Tuesday 3-0, ending a Capitals run of near-perfection in regulation play and of putting the puck in the net at a heavy rate. It was the Guy Boucher-led Senators’ seventh shutout of the campaign.
Earlier in January, the Capitals edged the Senators 2-1 and 1-0, meaning the Caps have scored just three goals in three meetings while winning two of those games.
The other 10 games they’ve played this month have seen them score 55. So it’s not as if the Capitals come up a little dry against the Senators, it’s that they’re demolishing all other opponents save their Canadian counterparts.
The goals Washington’s Philip Grubauer gave up? There’s an explanation for that.
Mike Condon made 31 saves for the shutout.
Before the tilt, Ottawa paid tribute to Senior Hockey Advisor Bryan Murray for his long tenure with the organization as head coach and general manager. Fittingly, the first member of the Senators’ Ring of Honour also coached the visiting Capitals early in his career.
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Hutton delaying Allen’s return?
It’s been a rough year for St. Louis Blues goalie Jake Allen. For all the Blues’ goalies, really.
And it’s gotten so bad that Allen was left off the team’s recent trip to Winnipeg after a run of terrible performances that prompted the Blues to recall Pheonix Copley to back up backup Carter Hutton.
The plan, according to head coach Ken Hitchcock, was to get Allen back in the lineup Thursday.
Tuesday, Hutton shut out the Pittsburgh Penguins.
I think it might just be.
After finishing fourth in the league last season with a team goals-against average of 2.40, the Blues are sixth-worst in 2016-17 with a 3.04 goals-against rate.
