Boston Bruins June 27, 2014: Draft Day Success
By Scott Roche
Seven years ago today, the Boston Bruins front office was at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia getting ready to make a first-round selection in the annual Entry Draft.
That season, the Bruins owned the 25th pick in the first-round and then-general manager Peter Chiarelli made one of his better first-round picks.
With the 25th pick, the Bruins chose a forward, David Pastrnak, from the Czech Republic. Little did the Black and Gold know that Pasta would become one of the NHL’s best goal scorers seven years later.
How good has Pastrnak been for the Bruins’? I really don’t need to tell you, but numbers-wise, they speak for themselves. In 438 career regular-season games, he has 200 goals and 227 assists. After getting his feet wet in his first two seasons with 25 goals and 28 assists combined, he took off in his third season in 2016-17.
For four consecutive seasons, he scored at least 30 goals a season, with his career-high coming the shortened 2019-20 season when he shared the Maurice Rocket Richard Award with Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals with 48 goals. The season was paused in mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic with 12 games remaining for Boston, so it almost a certainty that he was on his way to a 50-goal season.
This season, he missed the early part of the shortened 56-game 2020-21 season recovering from offseason hip surgery, but in 48 games, he still managed to score 20 goals and dish out 28 assists on the top line with Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron.
Since being out together, the trio is one of the top lines each night in the league.
In the postseason, Pastrnak has 27 career goals and 41 assists in 63 games. His best playoff production-wise was in 2020 when he had nine goals and 10 assists as the Bruins advanced to the Stanley Cup Final. This season in 11 games, he had seven goals and eight assists.
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There are times when he goes through scoring slumps, as he went through one in the middle of this year, but every time he steps on the ice, he has the ability to score at any moment. It’s hard to believe, but yes, seven years ago today, Pastrnak donned the Spoked-B for the first time.