Listless B’s trampled in matinee
‘The effort, it was not there’
Bruins’ coach Bruce Cassidy’s oft-spoken philosophy goes something like this: Not every player can have his A game every night, but when you don’t have it, you better bring your B game.
His thoughts after his team dropped a 4-0 decision to the New York Rangers at the Garden that was even more lopsided than the score indicated?
“We were well down the alphabet,” said the frustrated coach.
The Bruins have now gone more than a month without winning two games in a row — and they were not about to find any consistency with the performance they gave on Saturday at the Garden.
Quite simply, it was their worst start-to-finish performance of the year. They began the week by being shut out by New Jersey backup Scott Wedgewood and the finished it by being blanked by Ranger No. 3 Keith Kinkaid. At least they peppered Wedgewood with 40 shots last Sunday. They mustered just 18 against Kinkaid and, if any of those shots was a legitimate scoring chance, we’ll have to take a second look at the game tape to find it.
A performance like that could not be chalked up to any one factor, said Cassidy. There was an off-game from the top line. The power play had a bad game. The list of missing bodies grew, with Jake DeBrusk landing on the COVID protocol list on Saturday morning.
But Cassidy came to a damning bottom line conclusion.
“However you rate those things, it’s unacceptable,” said Cassidy. “Your effort has to be there every night. Effort and execution follow the players. We did not execute well. That’ll happen. The effort, it was not there.
That’s atypical of this group. That’s probably the most disappointing thing to me, the complete lack of effort and pushback. You’re not going to win every game. No team does. You’re not going to always look great. But the effort has to be there in the response. And it didn’t happen.”
As much as the Rangers outplayed the Bruins, the Blueshirts did try to throw their hosts a few lifelines. They gave the B’s five power plays, including ones at the start of the second and third periods when the B’s were still technically in the game and could have turned it around. But it was an 0-fer for the B’s PP, at one point inducing Cassidy to chuck his whiteboard. It didn’t matter which combination of players Cassidy tried, and he tried a few, nothing worked.
“They’re a pressure team on the PK and we weren’t ready for it,” said Cassidy. “We just weren’t ready to deal with the pressure. The execution was off and we were slow. We were moving some people around because pucks weren’t going in the net. Maybe we should have stuck with the original two groups. Injuries will move people around as well, but we’re trying to get other people (going). The other night it worked. (David Krejci) got his first goal and you hope that gives him some juice. With Jake being out and them playing together, that’s going to be put on hold for a bit. There are different reasons why you mess around with it. But at the end of the day, we just didn’t execute well enough. Then you get to individuals on the entries, which has been our issue in the past when our power-play hasn’t functioned well.”
The Bruins fell down 1-0 in the first period, and they were lucky it wasn’t worse than that.
While the B’s were without DeBrusk and Zach Senyshyn (upper body) on top of the three defensemen (Jeremy Lauzon, Kevan Miller, Brandon Carlo) and goaltender (Tuukka Rask) that are on the shelf, the Rangers got the jolt of Artemi Panarin’s return. On top of that, the Blueshirts looked like they might have been embarrassed with how they played in Thursday’s 4-0 loss.
They were all over the Bruins in the opening period and Jaroslav Halak (29 saves) had to make a handful of premium saves in the opening 20 minutes. The one he could not catch up to was a long-distance shot from rookie defenseman K’Andre Miller that was helped along by a Chris Kreider screen just 3:06 into the game.
It went downhill from there. The Rangers took a 2-0 lead at 5:42 of the second when Mika Zibanejad’s soft pass eluded the reach of a diving Jarred Tinordi and found Kreider, who lifted it over Halak’s blocker. That snapped a streak of the B’s allowing one or fewer goals at six straight games.
At 8:03 of the third, Ryan Strome added another one to remove any illusion that the Bruins were still in this one. Pavel Buchnevich popped in a late one to finish off the scoring.
The B’s are back in action on Monday in Pittsburgh. They will have some soulsearching to do until then.