Slide continues as Bruins’ fast start too much to handle
Bruins’ line of Heinen, Nash and Miller does the damage in a deflating 5-1 defeat
The Ottawa Senators were focused on the big right hook. They were knocked out by some short left jabs.
The result was a 5-1 thumping by the Boston Bruins at TD Garden on Wednesday that extended the Senators’ losing streak to four games. It also stopped Ottawa’s regular season run of victories over Boston at six games.
The Senators are in serious trouble, now 15 points behind the Bruins in the race for a playoff spot in the Atlantic Division.
“It’s been tough … you guys see it,” veteran Nate Thompson told reporters as a false fire alarm echoed through the building. “It’s just problems after problems that keep mounting up. We’re in a pretty tough situation right now…
“I think it was just a matter of one team being more desperate than the other. We had a three-day break, they had a three-day break. There’s really no excuses. We have to play a certain style of game, and we have to do it the whole game. We can’t just do it in spurts.”
Asked if somebody needs to get angry, Thompson replied: “We’ve got to do something. It’s pretty tough right now.”
Doing the damage in the latest loss was not the power line of Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak — which coach Guy Boucher tabbed before the game as the best he had seen so far this season — but Riley Nash (who scored his third and fourth of the season and added an assist), Danton Heinen (a rookie who now has nine), Kevan Miller (who scored his first) and David Backes (fifth).
Thomas Chabot scored the Senators’ only goal.
The Senators outshot the Bruins 17-16 through two periods and 26-23 on the night, but in his first game back from a bout with the flu, Craig Anderson turned in a weak performance.
The Bruins took a 2-0 lead on their first five shots.
Anderson made a save off Backes, then gave up a juicy rebound for Miller to step into at the 5:22 mark of the opening period.
Mike Hoffman paid for his guilt on that one, as he was stapled to the bench for all but three first period shifts and wound up with 12:13 of ice time.
“Some guys looked better than others in the first period,” Boucher said. “I just acted accordingly after that.”
The Bruins went ahead by a pair when Boston’s Ryan Spooner skated around Fredrik Claesson then set a pass just by Erik Karlsson’s skate to the stick of Heinen, who was left free by Ryan Dzingel.
“It’s been a little bit of our story this year,” said Karlsson, who was a minus-3. “We give up the lead a little bit too easy and too early, and we can’t find ways to push back.”
Claesson was tossed out of the game just past the 15-minute mark when he was called for a hit to the head of Noel Acciari. Down to five defenceman, the Senators were OK, with Cody Ceci again one of their best players.
Nash bumped the lead to 3-0 on a semi-break 85 seconds into the second period when he beat Anderson from well out with a shot high to the glove side.
Chabot put the Senators on the board a little more than two minutes later, when he one-timed a feed from Mark Stone that beat Tuukka Rask, the NHL’s most recent first star of the week.
That hard blast was good for Chabot’s second goal of the season.
“It’s great that I had the chance to be out there a lot, against pretty much every line quite a bit,” said Chabot, who finished with 21:17 of ice time. “But overall, we’re not proud of the way we played,”
Despite getting a boost of life, the Senators fell behind by three again when Dion Phaneuf lost the puck at the Ottawa blue-line. Nash looked like Connor McDavid as he deked out Anderson before tucking the puck home.
Hours before their first game after the Christmas break, Boucher raved that the line of Marchand, Bergeron and Pastrnak was “absolutely unbelievable,” Boucher said.
“The one thing is clear: You can’t give them any odd-man rushes because they’re experts at that.”
That line was held pointless, and to just five shots on goal. At least the Senators were able to execute that part of the game plan.