Talking Points: Pastrnak three-goal explosion paces B's over Leafs

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Is anybody going to slow down the Bruins' top line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak? After a nine-point outing from the trio in Saturday night's 5-1 win over the Maple Leafs at TD Garden, here are my talking points:

GOLD STAR: David Pastrnak once again was a scoring star for the Bruins. He finished with his second hat trick of the season and had four points overall with a plus-2 rating, a team-high seven shots on net and 12 shot attempts overall. Pastrnak was everywhere scoring goals on backdoor plays on the PP, winning puck battles and feeding pucks to Patrice Bergeron in front of the net and getting to scoring areas where the Maple Leafs didn’t have any answer for him. The only question now is how consistently he can maintain the hot streak that he’s currently been on for over a month with 15 goals scored in 16 games for the Bruins. Pastrnak doesn’t show any signs of slowing down and instead looks like he’s ready to take things to another level this season.

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BLACK EYE: Morgan Rielly finished a minus-2 for the Maple Leafs and he got thoroughly worked in the defensive zone on the first Bruins goal of the game. David Pastrnak basically took the puck away from him during a 1-on-1 battle for possession in the corner, Pastrnak wheeled behind the Toronto net and then Patrice Bergeron beat Rielly to the front of the net for the redirection goal. Clearly the Leafs D-man has taken things to another level offensively this season -- and he’s received credit for that -- but Toronto is going to have issues whenever he’s forced to play defense against good players, like he found himself doing on Saturday night.

TURNING POINT: The real turning point for the Bruins was withstanding the first 10-minute wave from Toronto in the first period where they controlled the play. As it was, the Leafs outshot the Bruins by a 20-6 margin in the first period and truly dominated in Boston’s end for long stretches of it. But Jaroslav Halak was able to stop everything thrown at him in that first period during a key portion of the game, and that allowed the Bruins to finally get their legs under them. Once that happened, the B’s top line teamed for a late first period goal against the Maple Leafs, and dominated the rest of the game in a super-solid victorious effort.

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HONORABLE MENTION: Patrice Bergeron has been strong this season, and that was the case in an important bounce-back game. It was good leadership getting the rest of the team ready, but then Bergeron went one step further and produced in a big way in a big spot. Bergeron had his fifth game with at least three points altogether in 18:43 of ice time, and also dealt with once again getting thrown out of the face-off circle with alarming regularity early in the game. Once he settled in, though, he scored the game’s first goal toward the end of the first period and got the ball rolling for the rest of his line for another dominant night. The three points, the plus-2 rating and the seven shot attempts were a fair indication that Bergeron had his way offensively, and they also shut down the John Tavares line as well with great two-way play.

BY THE NUMBERS: 12 – the number of hits between Chris Wagner and Sean Kuraly in the win over Toronto. Both fourth-liners seemed to get the message that harder play was needed after Noel Acciari was a healthy scratch.

QUOTE TO NOTE: "A good dinner maybe, a good breakfast...say a couple of swear words and went to bed." –David Pastrnak, when asked why he felt so good in getting the hat trick against the Leafs on Saturday night. 

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