Bruins can’t cap rally
Fall to Jackets in shootout
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Bruins were on their way to being embarrassed at Nationwide Arena last night.
They sleepwalked through the first period against a good Columbus Blue Jackets team, managing just four shots and falling into a twogoal deficit on scores by David Savard and Boone Jenner. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Jackets blasted the B’s on the final shift of the period, doling out hit after hit to rile up the home crowd.
In the intermission, coach Bruce Cassidy told his players, in no uncertain terms, they had their heads up their keisters. Whatever he said worked as well as could be expected. The B’s erased a three-goal deficit to steal a point but lost 4-3 in a shootout when Artemi Panarin and Oliver Bjorkstrand beat Tuukka Rask.
“Sometimes you need that ugly truth,” Patrice Bergeron said. “Every second of that first period we didn’t like. We didn’t compete, we didn’t play well. We got back in the game, but then maybe we would have had more if we started from the drop of the puck. Hopefully we can learn from that.”
In the offseason, Cassidy talked to his veterans about pulling along the young players. Last night they did so quite literally as a number of vets combined to pull a point out of the fire.
First, captain Zdeno Chara started the second period by letting the Jackets know they would not be allowed to fly around the ice. He drilled Josh Anderson into the end boards, and when the young winger challenged him, Chara dropped the gloves.
“Z’s a great leader,” Cassidy said. “There were some things said between periods by the coaching staff, by myself to the players. Some games it just doesn’t go your way, but we didn’t come in the first period ready to compete. And Z took it upon himself.”
The fight didn’t pay immediate dividends. In fact, when Tyler Motte got behind Chara and beat Rask on a breakaway at the 8:27 mark for a 3-0 lead, the game seemed finished.
But Bergeron put the B’s on the board on a power play at 15:37 of the second, taking a Danton Heinen feed and ripping it over the shoulder of goalie Sergei Bobrovsky.
The B’s got the break of the game when Matt Calvert was called for a highsticking double minor at 8:04 of the third period.
At first it looked like Brad Marchand hampered the B’s chances greatly when he took a tripping penalty 1:03 after Calvert’s penalty. But on the ensuing 4-on-4, the struggling Torey Krug breathed even more air into the B’s with his second goal of the season off a Kevan Miller feed.
And when Marchand stepped out the box with more time still left on the Calvert double minor, he took a Bergeron pass and snapped a shot over Bobrovsky to tie the game.
The Bruins had a great opportunity to win it in regulation when Bjorkstrand ran Krug from behind into the boards with 5:24. Bjorkstrand eventually was assessed a five-minute major, but not until after an incensed Miller charged in and laid a beating on him. Miller earned two for instigating, five for fighting (which wiped out the boarding major), a 10-minute misconduct and a game misconduct. So instead of going on a five-minute power play, the B’s had to kill off Miller’s instigating minor, which they did.
“To be honest with you, thinking back on it now, maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” Miller said. “But in the heat of the moment, when you see your teammate get hit like that, it’s hard to restrain yourself. You never want to see a guy get hit like that and guys taking liberties, so I just reacted to be honest.”
Considering how lifeless the B’s were in the first period, Cassidy wasn’t about to criticize Miller.
“It’s going to be dissected, but it’s part of what Kevan Miller does,” Cassidy said. “He’s going to stick up for his teammates, so it’s difficult to get upset with him even though we would have been on a five-minute power play. But ... that’s what brings teams together.”
And if the B’s make a run to the playoffs, maybe this game will be looked back on as a seminal moment in their progress.
But if they come out against the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday night looking like they did early against the Jackets, this could be a long season.