No. 1: His defensemen can't score goals. Well, they can, but they don't, or at least haven't yet. Black and Gold blue liners have put the puck in the net but five times through 27 games, dead last among the league's 32 teams (tied, astonishingly, with the Panthers, the defending two-time Cup champs).
Boston defensemen haven't been this lackluster on offense since the dark, darker, and darkest days of the early-'60s, when the dusty old Garden was littered deep in losses, the days before that kid with a brush cut arrived from Parry Sound, Ontario, and rewrote the NHL's blue line metrics.
No. 2: Stop the Black and Gold parade to the penalty box. Stated another way, cut the nonsense, particularly the lazy stick fouls.
In their 3-2 shootout win Saturday night, Bruins penalties put the Red Wings on the power play five times. That's just a tick above their sorrowful standard. As of Sunday morning, the Bruins had played short a league-high 106 times, a couple of touchdowns ahead of Vancouver (92), the league's No. 2 serial offender.
It's not a problem that has suddenly crept into their game. Sturm has been shaking his head over the motherlode of minors now for two months, ever since his penalty-prone charges played a man down 12 times in their opening three games. To date, that rate has held nearly as steady as the goals delivered off of Morgan Geekie's red-hot stick. Spoiler alert: only one of those is good.
Easy fixes? Not really. The calendar alone tells us so.
December arrives on Monday and the 15-12-0 Bruins, who'll face the Red Wings Tuesday in Detroit, are in considerably better shape two months into the 82-game season than most expected. They have a legit chance to pick off a playoff spot, based on a .556 points percentage as of Sunday morning that ranked them 10th in the East. That makes them wild card material right now, taking aim at a No. 7 or 8 seed.
Not bad, yet if Sturm and his coaching staff fail to iron out the aforementioned bugaboos, it will prove a struggle to stay in the hunt.
The defensemen scored three times (Jordan Harris, Nikita Zadorov, and Mason Lohrei) in the opening nine games, a decent, albeit hardly overwhelming, start. They've scored only twice more (Hampus Lindholm, Lohrei) in the 18 games since.
At their current rate, Bruins defensemen will finish with 15 goals, their lowest haul ever in an 82-game season and the worst in over 60 years. Across their six sad sack seasons, 1957-63, blue liners scored a total 75 goals, an average of 12.5 per season. To finish with only 15 this season would be their lowest output since potting 11 in 1962-63.
In 1925-26, the Bruins' second season of existence, their blue liners scored 20 goals. And that was a 36-game schedule. Cruel math.
Granted, Sturm has been without Charlie McAvoy for over two weeks, the No. 1 defenseman exiting the lineup Nov. 15 when struck in the face by a shot in Montreal. His absence may have impacted the unit's goal production, but keep in mind, McAvoy has yet to score a goal in 2025-26 (19 games, 0-14-14) and typically scores 9-10 times a season. It's way more than being without McAvoy.
Barring the second coming of Bobby Orr (see: Colorado, Cale Makar), Sturm's fix-it kit will have to include, first, getting more shots out of the current group. He'll have to do that either with his current X's and O's approach or by instructing them to activate, attack off the points with the puck on their stick or jump into shooting opportunities (such as short-range one-timers. The towering Zadorov shows tiny flashes of brilliance at doing both. He should be a source to exploit now.
Through 27 games, Boston backliners have landed 172 shots, connecting 2.91 percent of the time. The Capitals, their blue liners topping the charts with 22 goals, have hit the net 250 times and scored at an 8.8 percent rate. More shots, greater accuracy. Ditto for the Ducks: 17 goals, 215 shots, 7.91 percent success rate. More shots alone won't fix it, but it has to start there.
As for the penalty parade, Sturm figures the remedy is for his guys to skate more, check with their feet, and not their sticks. Al Arbour, during his years directing the Islanders dynasty, treated such lapses by conducting a drill that had players, particularly defensemen, holding their sticks by the blade end. It rendered them unable to filch pucks or trip opponents. The message: move your feet! And, yes, Arbour yelled, even sometimes at Denis Povtin.
Sturm, when asked about the penalties on Saturday, acknowledged the need for skating and for puck movement. Too often, he said, his club has been pinned in its own end. Smarter puck possession and better, cleaner breakouts could draw the penalties out of their opponents that their opponents are drawing out of them.
Injuries. They will never end. It's the nature of a high-speed, often brutal game. The harder problems to deal with can be those that are self-inflicted.