B’s bolting downward
Fourth straight loss hurts
Just eight days ago, the Bruins went into Calgary and beat the hottest team in the league to seemingly announce that they were indeed a new team. Forget about the collapses of the last two years.
That was then. This is now. The confidence and swagger from that win disappeared in record time.
After two hard-fought but critical losses to Toronto and Ottawa, the B’s kicked away a very winnable game against a reeling Tampa Bay Lightning team, losing 6-3 last night at the Garden. They gave up three straight one-goal leads in the second period and didn’t show up for the third, allowing the Lightning to run away with it.
“At the end of the day, I think it is a focus, it’s urgency, and understanding time and score. We did not have a good comprehension of that tonight, and of late,” said interim coach Bruce Cassidy.
It was the B’s fourth straight loss as they cling to a two-point cushion over tomorrow’s foe, the Islanders, who play Pittsburgh tonight. Toronto pulled three points ahead for third place in the Atlantic Division with a win over New Jersey.
With their third straight playoff DNQ staring them in the face, the B’s better hope to find their game even quicker than they lost it.
Last night, the B’s got caught deep in the offensive zone a couple of times. They left dangerous players, namely the hat trick-scoring Nikita Kucherov, wide open. They gave away pucks. They took bad penalties. By the end, they looked totally discombobulated.
“Not being focused, not being sharp at this time of the year is unacceptable,” said captain Zdeno Chara. “It’s on us to be better. Those kind of situations shouldn’t happen. For sure, we need to address those things and hold each other accountable.”
The B’s were barely done celebrating each of their three goals in the second period when they had to dig the puck out of their own net. David Pastrnak gave the B’s the lead with a power-play goal, Brayden Point tied it up 44 seconds later. Chara made it 2-1 with a shorthanded goal, Kucherov tied it on the same power play 24 seconds later. And when Riley Nash made it 3-2, the B’s savored the lead for a whole minute and 35 seconds before Anton Stralman beat Tuukka Rask, not at his best, with a shortside shot off the rush.
But when Tampa Bay punched first in the third — the most important period to date — the B’s could not counter. Jonathan Drouin put the Bolts up 4-3 at 4:12 when he whistled a slapper under Rask’s arm. A save would have been nice there. Then after Pastrnak took a careless high-sticking penalty, Kucherov’s one-timer pinballed off Chara and Adam McQuaid into the net for a 5-3 lead at 10:11. Game over. Kucherov added an empty-netter.
The B’s new aggressive approach that worked so well when Cassidy took over has seemingly given way to a devil-may-care approach. Pastrnak and Brad Marchand combined for seven giveaways. In the third, the B’s were reduced to trying for home run passes that led to three straight icings. The B’s seemingly lost their hockey minds last night.
“I think today we might have thought it would be easy,” said David Krejci, shaking his head. “I don’t know what happened, but we definitely didn’t play the way we did against Ottawa and Toronto. I know we lost those games, but we played hard and showed that we wanted to win. But today we just had to be better.”
And so Cassidy faces his first real crisis since taking over. Last night, it appeared the operation was coming apart at the seams. He’s got to figure out how to sew it back together by the time the puck drops in Brooklyn.
“If anything, we need to re-educate ourselves in this winning ways,” said David Backes, “all the sacrifices we made for each other in all the hard areas that you have to make every night in this league in order to win. It’s tough, but we’ve got a group that can do it every night. To me, when you string losses together, you maybe lose that recollection of how we were trucking along when things were falling on the right side of the ledger for us. We’ve got a day to dial it back in and that’s what we need to look for, our best effort of the year against a team that’s going to be right there with us. It’s a huge game, biggest game of the year. We need to show that we’re playing for keeps.”
That was clearly not the case last night.