Friday night presented the Boston Bruins with the perfect opportunity to build on Wednesday’s six-goal explosion down on Long Island. They got to host the Pittsburgh Penguins, the team that has allowed the most goals in the NHL and has the worst goal differential.
So much for that. Instead, the Bruins took one of their most frustrating steps back in a season already full of them. They scored 1:24 into the game, and then not at all over the remaining 58:36, ultimately falling 2-1. They became just the third team all season to be held under two goals by Pittsburgh, joining the lowly Montreal Canadiens and Anaheim Ducks in a club of futility.
Interim head coach Joe Sacco said after the game that he “wouldn’t call it a step back,” but it’s hard to come up with any other description for Friday’s effort.
This was not like Tuesday’s 2-0 loss to the Canucks, a game in which the Bruins controlled play against a good team, more than doubled Vancouver in shots, recorded a whopping 18 high-danger chances, and just ran into a hot goalie.
No, this was a game in which the Bruins legitimately did not create enough chances and often played the game on the terms of what should have been a lesser opponent. They recorded just seven high-danger chances in this one, and only two of them in the game’s first 40 minutes before they finally turned up the intensity at least a little bit once they fell behind 2-1 with 12:34 left in the game.
“I thought our first period was pretty decent. You jump out to an early lead. It’s what you do after that,” Charlie Coyle said. “I don’t think anyone can say we like how we played after that. It was like we kind of changed up our game and stopped doing the things that add up and give us opportunities in their end. We kind of strayed away from it. They had their little pushes. It just shouldn’t happen that way.”
And unlike the first four games of the Sacco era, when they had tightened up their defensive structure, the Bruins surrendered 15 high-danger chances, the most they have allowed in a game since an 8-2 loss to Carolina on Halloween. A lot of that came off the rush, with the Bruins too often allowing themselves to get pulled into a more open, up-and-down game that the Penguins want to play and that the Bruins, as currently constituted, cannot play.
“We got caught up in a little bit of a game we probably shouldn’t have played,” Sacco said. “It’s not to our strength. We’re at our best when we’re checking, when we’re tight through the neutral zone, when we’re stiff in our own end. So, we gotta get back to that. It slipped a little bit for us here tonight, that part of our game.”
Things could have been worse if not for several 10-bell saves from Jeremy Swayman on point-blank chances, and yet, even Swayman shouldn’t feel too good about himself after this one. The two goals he did allow were stoppable. He overcommitted on the initial shot on the first and could not get square again as Rickard Rakell was left with a lot of net to shoot at as he tied the game with just 0.8 seconds left in the second period. On the second, Swayman got fooled by a bit of a changeup off the stick of Philip Tomasino and got beat five-hole.
Jeremy Swayman on the Penguins’ first goal: “It wasn’t textbook goaltending, that’s for sure.” pic.twitter.com/xJl36wD265
— Scott McLaughlin (@smclaughlin9) November 30, 2024
The power play, which had come out firing to start the Sacco era last week, reverted to bad habits like overpassing, ultimately landing just four shots on goal on three man advantages. When the Bruins drew a power play a few minutes after Tomasino’s go-ahead goal, in a crucial moment in the game, they wasted it. A David Pastrnak one-timer from outside the dots was the only decent look, but Tristan Jarry had plenty of time to get square to it. A Pastrnak turnover towards the end of that power play drew groans and boos from the TD Garden crowd, sucking the air out of the building, and out of the Bruins’ comeback bid.
“We’ve talked about that with the power play. They know what they need to do,” Sacco said. “I’m not gonna say it’s overpassing. We talked about how that power play can be effective for us, and we just have to execute it on the ice.”
The Bruins had been playing better hockey in their first four games under Sacco, three of which they won. Friday’s loss doesn’t completely undo that progress, but it at least temporarily kills any positive vibes the Bruins had taken into Thanksgiving.
Getting outplayed by the worst 5-on-5 team in the league, and held to one goal by the worst defensive team, just shouldn’t happen. Whether Sacco wanted to admit it or not, it was a big step back, and a return of some of the bad habits the Bruins hoped they had started to leave behind.
Another bad habit for this team pre-coaching change was allowing bad games to multiply and turn into losing streaks. The Bruins will try to shake that habit when they host another bad team, the Montreal Canadiens, Sunday afternoon in Boston’s Centennial Game, 100 years to the day of the franchise’s first-ever NHL game.
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