B’s move on after loss
Look to rebound with home run
The Bruins took yesterday off to reflect upon their 5-3 loss to the Predators — a mostly self-inflicted defeat — before returning to practice today and back to work tomorrow night against the Arizona Coyotes.
This is a critical juncture for the B’s, for it is a time in the schedule in which they must take care of business. They have eight of their next 10 games at home, and the two on the road are against struggling teams in Detroit and Buffalo.
The quicker they expunge the taste of Monday’s loss — in which they spotted the Preds a 4-0 lead — the better.
“Not losing two in a row is a sign of a good team, so we need a great response when we play again. We’re going to get home, get some rest and get in front of our great fans who’ll give us some energy again at the Garden,” forward David Backes said. “We’ve got to learn from the start. I think that’s been indicative of the final score for us all year, whether I’ve been watching or playing. If we start well and we’ve got our legs and we’re making simple, hard plays in the first period, typically the whole game turns in our tide. If we’re waiting back and seeing what the other team is going to bring us, we tend to chase it, tend to dig ourselves holes and need a lot of work to climb out from them. (Monday) was the latter, and we need more of the former.”
Perhaps it was a sign of growing confidence in the Bruins dressing room that the tipping of the cap to one of the NHL’s best and hottest teams was perfunctory. They knew the loss was more about how they played and not how the defending Western Conference champions played.
The B’s might not have made a ton of mistakes, but they were doozies, and the Preds were quick to capitalize. On the other side, the B’s didn’t cash in all of their scoring chances. David Pastrnak alone had two glittering chances that went for naught — one in the first minute of the game when he was left all alone in front, the second in the third period when he missed a tap-in on a power play with the B’s down 5-3.
The Bruinss could have survived the un-cashed chances if not for the mistakes at the other end.
“We gave up some really good scoring opportunities, and you can’t do that against that team,” said winger Brad Marchand, whose line with Pastrnak and Patrice Bergeron was the only unit not scored upon. “They’re pretty deep, they play hard. But they didn’t really deserve a lot. We just kind of gave it to them. Tough to lose like that.”
That bad start was an anomaly for the B’s of late. They scored the first goal in six of their previous seven games, including five straight. But while no one was celebrating a moral victory for making it a game late, the B’s at least showed some of their growing character by refusing to roll over.
“We’re a team that can be down but never out,” defenseman Torey Krug said. “We take a lot of pride in battling back in situations like that because it’s just a fact that we’ll be in a situation like that at some points during the season. It’s about limiting that and having the starts that we usually have. We’ve found a way to fix that part of our game, and maybe we need to go back and take control of it before it slips away again. But our starts have been consistent, and battling back when we get down has to be consistent as well.”