Jakub Lauko brings the fight to Bruins

The 23-year-old only missed seven games due to the injury and returned wearing a protective cage on his helmet as his facial fractures healed up sufficiently. He still wears neck protection after the incident and says that will be a staple for the rest of his professional hockey career while banging bodies and using his high-speed style of play to create a little good, old-fashioned chaos on the ice.

Lauko eventually ditched the protective cage on his helmet several weeks ago after returning to game action on Nov. 11, but this week was the first time Lauko truly had the green light to play exactly the way he wanted to as a fourth-line winger bent on playing energy and a little attitude.

He was medically cleared without limitations after sufficiently healing from the facial fractures suffered back in October and didn’t waste any time returning to some hockey fisticuffs.  

To that end, Lauko dropped the gloves with Connor Dewar in the first period of Tuesday night’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Minnesota Wild at TD Garden. It was the perfect time to stir up a little trouble after Minnesota had just jumped to a 1-0 lead in the first period, so it was “go time” for the young Czech forward.

“It was the first week I got the green light to fight,” said Lauko, who has trained with MMA fighters in his native Czech Republic in the last couple of summer offseasons. “So I went into this game — the first time that I could do my thing and play my game. Obviously, when you can fight, you can just go around, run around, trying to hit everyone. This was the first game that I could play the way I wanted to.”

The emotional lift from Lauko’s tilt was immediate as he frantically raised his arms and glared at the Bruins bench yelling “Let’s go!” as a highly approving TD Garden crowd serenaded him with cheers on the way to the penalty box.

“It’s a thing that gets you going, gets the guys going,” said Lauko, who watched the Bruins pot a pair of first-period goals after his tilt. “So it’s a lot of emotion at the time. Yeah, I kind of just let it out. It’s been boiling in me for two months, so I just wanted to let it out. I think we scored right after, so I think it was a job well done.”

The bounce back in Lauko’s step was noticeable to everyone as he brought sufficient fourth line energy along with his fellow linemates Johnny Beecher and Oskar Steen. That will need to be a consistent thing for the Black and Gold as the Bruins coaches have been forced to resort to shortening their third period bench during recent games, and that is not something sustainable over the course of a long 82-game regular season.

“I do think it was his best game,” said Jim Montgomery following the overtime loss. “Just because of his intensity on pucks. He was physical. I think he had at least three big hits that I remember. And I thought it was the fourth line’s best game in a long time and it was much needed for us. It helped us.”

It wasn’t just the physicality either, as Lauko nearly scored on a “Michigan” style lacrosse goal a little later in the period, and finished with a couple of blocked shots, a hit and a shot attempt in 8:39 of ice time.

It’s an interesting time for Boston’s fourth line as they continue to find their identity without Milan Lucic, who was expected to be a fixture with that group before off-ice issues forced his exit from the team. Montgomery actually had a meeting with Beecher, Lauko and Steen where he challenged all three forwards to be a bigger factor for the team with their effort, aggression and two-way play.

There isn’t a bruising Lucic-style presence on the way, so the answers will have to come from within for Boston’s energy line. Certainly, the Bruins need it these days with the dog days of the season coming where they’ll need a fourth line to play bigger minutes while providing injections of physicality and dollops of energy.

“We had a meeting with Monty [on Tuesday] morning… He thought we’ve been playing okay, but not as good as we can be,” said Beecher, who collected his second assist of the season on a David Pastrnak goal in the first period. “We just wanted to come out and play fast and hard. I mean, we’re not going out there expecting to score 60 goals this season.”

While they aren’t expected to score 60 goals as a line this season and certainly not 60 goals individually even as they do have a teammate capable of doing just that, they can chip in. It’s exactly what Beecher did winning a puck along the side wall in the defensive zone, carrying it up the ice and then feeding Pastrnak for Boston’s first goal just a few minutes after Lauko electrified the bench.

That’s a nice little blueprint for success for Lauko, Beecher and anybody else that’s skating on the B’s fourth line this season. Now it’s a matter of going out and doing those little things on a consistent basis for a Black and Gold hockey club in need of an energetic, physical and hard-to-play-against fourth line in the post-holiday portion of their schedule.