Connor McDavid, Linus Ullmark and Dmitry Orlov: What to watch for in Oilers-Bruins

BOSTON -- After a well-deserved four-day break, the Boston Bruins get back to work on Thursday night at TD Garden. And it ought to be a good one.

The Bruins are hosting the Edmonton Oilers in a rematch of a dynamite matchup from a week ago in Alberta. The game will air exclusively on ESPN+, which may be a hassle for local fans but will also be beaming the game into more homes around North America. (Does it still count as a "nationally broadcast" game if it's not actually being "broadcast" on a cable network? Expert opinions may vary.)

The Bruins may be sitting pretty, 11 points ahead of Carolina in the standings, en route to what should be a pretty smooth ride to the Presidents' Trophy. (That's been an ignominious and cursed accomplishment for the past decade, sure. But that's a story for another day.) But despite all of the winning they've done so far, there's still quite a bit of work to do.

It starts Thursday, which kicks off a four-week stretch where the Bruins never get more than one day of rest between games. That includes a five-game road trip through Detroit, Chicago, Winnipeg, Minnesota and Buffalo, and also a back-to-back of road matinees in Pittsburgh and St. Louis to end the stretch. 

After that, the Bruins can catch their breath with a three-day break, when they'll assess where they're at and set up a plan for the end of the season before finishing up with their final five games.

And it all begins Thursday night. So here's what to watch for after the puck drops around 7:30 p.m.

Connor McDavid

Duh.

It's not every day that the greatest player alive visits the Commonwealth, so Connor McDavid is obviously the No. 1 item on this list.

In case you've been putting in a great effort to not notice, McDavid is in the midst of a historic season. 

He leads the NHL in goals with 54. That's 10 more than David Pastrnak, who ranks second. He leads the league in assists with 70, four more than Nikita Kucherov.

Naturally, then, he leads the league with 124 points ... and nobody else has more than 96.

McDavid is on pace to tally 156 points, which would rank 14th all time. On the surface, 14th all time wouldn't sound all that spectacular. But when you consider that spots 1-13 are all occupied by Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, and when you consider that all of those seasons took place between 1980 and 1996, the context of McDavid's season starts to come into focus.

Going back to the lockout in 2004-05, the single-season high for points is 128, set by Kucherov in 2018-19. McDavid might reach that mark in this game alone, with 16 games left in the regular season. (McDavid has 10 four-point games this season, if you were curious.)

This will be just the sixth visit to Boston for McDavid in his career, and he's never been kept off the scoresheet in his first five trips. He's scored two goals and added five assists for seven points on Boston ice, and overall he's tallied 16 points in 10 games against the Bruins. That includes the two goals he scored last week in what ended up as a 3-2 win for the Bruins.

As the most explosive player in the world, McDavid draws the attention of every single opposing skater on the ice, as well as every player and coach on the bench. Still, in a split second, he generally manages to find himself some open space, and he seemingly always capitalizes when he does.

The Bruins will do what they can to limit him, but with a rare player like McDavid, there's only so much you can do. So while the Bruins work their hardest to keep him contained, the rest of us can just enjoy the show.

Orlov On The PP?

The Bruins haven't offered up many reasons for concern this year, but their power play has certainly been quite cold for some time.

Since the start of February, the Bruins' power play is scoring on just 13.5 percent of their opportunities. That's eighth-worst in the league. The Bruins had been scoring on 25.3 percent of power-play opportunities prior to that, which was sixth-best in the NHL. So clearly, something's gone wrong.

Fortunately for them, it appears that change may be coming. Dmitry Orlov, who's already contributed offensively more than the Bruins likely anticipated when they acquired him, skated with the first power play unit at practice on Wednesday.

Orlov replaced Charlie McAvoy in that unit, with the rest of the unit -- Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Jake DeBrusk -- remaining intact.

The idea here is to perhaps encourage more shots from the lone D-man at the point, thus leading to either a redirect from DeBrusk or a loose-puck opportunity for Marchand or Bergeron. As teams have rightfully honed in on Pastrnak, the Bruins may need to present more of an offensive threat from the blue line. And with Orlov scoring three goals and tallying six assists in just five games with Boston (earning NHL First Star of the Week in the process), he may be the perfect solution.

It might help that the Oilers have the 25th-ranked penalty kill in the league, too.

Linus

As mentioned, the Bruins won that game against Edmonton, but the top goaltender in the NHL had the night off. Jeremy Swayman stopped three McDavid shots and 19 non-McDavid shots to earn that win.

This time, presumably it will be Linus Ullmark getting the chance to shut down the NHL's No. 1 scoring team. That figures to be worth the price of admission -- though with the way the market is trending for Bruins tickets, perhaps nothing is quite worth that price.

In addition to McDavid and his 54 goals, the Oilers have Leon Draisaitl (41 goals), Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (30 goals) and Zach Hyman (29 goals) as major threats up front.

But the Bruins have Ullmark, who's allowed two or fewer goals in six of his last seven starts, posting a .945 save percentage and a 7-0-0 record since the start of February. (The one game when Ullmark allowed three goals came when the Flames fired 57 shots on him.)

Ullmark's season has been well-documented at this point, and the Vezina Trophy appears to already have his name on it. Still, as mentioned earlier, there's a decent way to go between now and the postseason, so games like Thursday offer the 29-year-old an opportunity to be at his best while playing against the best.