Bruins notebook: Jakub Zboril becoming a viable option

There is no guarantee that Jakub Zboril will be back in the lineup when the Bruins resume play on Saturday in Philadelphia. In fact, given that veteran Mike Reilly has provided enough evidence that he can a better player than he’s been in the early part of this season — not to mention the fact that that evidence earned a Reilly a three-year, $9 million extension last summer — it would not be a shock if Zboril winds up back in street clothes on Saturday.

But at the very least, what Zboril did in his two games over last weekend — which produced a pair of 5-2 victories — was to establish a sense of competition within the defense corps. If those two games are any indication of where his game is now, Zboril has made himself a viable option again.

It has been a long road for Zboril just to get to this point. Taken with the 13th overall draft pick in the 2015 draft, the Czech-born defenseman had borne some of the burden of the team’s big misses in that draft.

He’s readily admitted that the criticism had affected him in the past.

“I’m over it now, but it was especially hard the year after the draft. I was on social media at that time and I was just getting roasted every single day,” said the 24-year-old Zboril on Tuesday. “And so I got off social media. I deleted Instagram, I deleted Twitter. Now I’m just on Facebook where I just have family members and people I know. And I feel that it’s really cleared up my head space. I’m more focused on what I should do and just not reading tweets about me.”

Coach Bruce Cassidy has an idea of what Zboril went through because he lived the experience himself, at least the 1980s version of it. There was no social media when he was taken 18th overall in the 1983 draft by the Chicago Blackhawks, but he heard a few things that were hard to ignore for a kid when he went back home to Ottawa in the offseason.

“Your friends are like ‘Hey, what’s going on? Where the hell is Saginaw, what are you doing there? You’ve got to get up (to Chicago).’ It gets to you after a while,” said Cassidy, whose NHL aspirations were derailed by a knee injury suffered shortly after he was drafted.

“You feel like you’re letting your people down a little bit, the people closest to you. It never bothered me what a guy wrote about me in the paper. It was more about the people closest to me. That’s some of the things young people who are high picks have to fight through mentally.”

Zboril has gotten through that part. Now he’s trying to figure how to be a every day player in the NHL. Last season, the B’s let Torey Krug walk because of the money he could get on the open market, and then made the tough decision of only offering Zdeno Chara a reduced role, which the former captain declined. That opened spots for Zboril and Jeremy Lauzon. Zboril had some very good nights early, but leveled off a bit.

Then he said he suffered a couple of concussions that, in hindsight, affected the way he played, as caution understandably crept into his game.

“To be honest, I thought I still played pretty good. But the coaches disagreed with me on that. They didn’t like my game,” said Zboril. “Now looking back on it, I feel like I know what the feedback was and what I had to do, so I took it to my heart and whenever I go out there this year I’m going to show that I’m not scared to battle for pucks, being a physical guy and at the same time making plays with the puck the way I can do it.”

Whether Zboril’s in the lineup or not on Saturday, Cassidy was pleased with his work over the weekend. He whiffed on a big hit against the Canadiens on a sequence that led to a goal against, but the coach appreciated the intent, if not the decision. And he showed his offensive upside, making a nifty play at the blue line in Jersey and then showing his skating and maneuverability through the neutral zone to get a secondary assist on Charlie McAvoy’s first goal against the Habs.

“If he can keep building on a couple of those plays that manufacture some offense it’s going o help him, because he does have some secondary offense that he can provide. (Matt Grzelcyk) had that issue coming into the league and then he got confident and all of a sudden he’s making some of those plays. I think Jakub can do that as well” said Cassidy, who said he staff is having discussions about whether to try Zboril on the right side as well. “And he’s a bigger body, so some of the physicality he’s trying to show us now is a good thing, because we’ve asked for a bit of that. We’ve lost some players over the year who have done that and we have to do it by committee and he can certainly do that.”

This and that

Craig Smith, who missed the last two games with what’s believed to be a lower body injury, skated prior to practice on Tuesday. Though he didn’t participate in the full team session, Cassidy believes Smith is on target for Saturday. Curtis Lazar, who missed Sunday’s game, was a full participant in practice.

Trent Frederic, who suffered what’s believed to be a concussion against Ottawa on Nov. 9, remained off the ice.

“Freddy is OK, but I wouldn’t call him close to going out with us,” said Cassidy. …

In discussing Zboril, Cassidy said one area on which he’s improved is his appreciation of the importance of practice time. If you watch Bruins’ practices regularly, that appreciation from the players is hard to miss. In Tuesday’s practice, Brad Marchand and Anton Blidh went at it on a one-on-one drill, one player going on offense at one end of the rink then switching roles at the other. They beat the crap out of each other up and down the ice before collapsing in a heap in at the end.

They eventually got up, bumped fists and got back in line.

“I think Anton actually has some Marchie in him where he’s probably thinking ‘I’m going to go after Marchie today because I know he’s going to get annoyed.’ He likes to annoy people,” said Cassidy.