The Boston Bruins clearly don’t have an overabundance of weaknesses right now given that it’s taken until the first weekend of November to finally lose a game in regulation.
We are living in Nitpick City at this point with a B’s group that’s absolutely exceeded expectations at every turn and has found a pair of young guys in Matt Poitras and Mason Lohrei that look like bona fide NHL impact players.
But one of those possible weak spots reared its head again in a hard-fought, gritty 5-4 loss to the Detroit Red Wings at Little Caesars Arena on Saturday night, a short week after they dispatched of the Red Wings on home ice in an equally competitive game. The Bruins now stand 11-1-1 on the season and know that gaudy record to start the year means they’ll see other team’s best shot, much as they did last season while leading the Atlantic Division in wire-to-wire fashion.
“I thought Detroit was really good on the power play,” said Jim Montgomery on NESN following the game. “They were zipping the puck, they were one-touching it. That makes it hard. With the man advantage, they were moving it around quicker than we could defend it.
This league gets better every ten games, and we’re at the start of the second segment. The intensity was significantly up from what we saw previously. It’s something we can learn from, especially on the road dealing with the adversity. We had to fight a lot of adversity within the game. I didn’t like the rush defense and the odd-man rushes we were giving up during the game.”
Clearly there are also areas to improve for the B’s hockey club and it feels like the sheer number of penalties they’re taking is an issue worth watching a little more closely. The B’s are seventh in the NHL with 133 penalty minutes through 11 games, an average of six minor penalties (or 12 penalty minutes) per game.
Granted some of that is moments like Saturday night’s 10-minute misconduct given to Hampus Lindholm when things were getting nasty in the final seconds with Lindholm and Dylan Larkin getting into it after the whistle. But it’s not really inflated by a spate of hockey fights or major penalties beyond that match call that got Charlie McAvoy suspended earlier this week.
It feels more like Boston’s penalty kill is getting quite a workout over the first month of the season, even as it’s been outstanding performance-wise by any measure or metric.
The Bruins rank second in the NHL with a 93.6 percent kill success rate and have already had two long stretches of penalties killed off on the young season.
Brandon Carlo has stepped up again this season as a killer extraordinaire in front of the Boston net and Charlie Coyle has become a center relied upon for faceoffs, penalty killing and matching up against the other team’s best players defensively.
“I take a lot of pride in it. You want to be a guy that’s relied upon in those tough situations,” said Coyle. “So if that’s what the team needs and that’s what they want from me then I’m going to make it happen and do that to the best of my ability. There are a lot of guys that do things like that in different facets of the game and that’s what makes up a good team. I’m just trying to do my part.”
Unfortunately, for the B’s one of those epic consecutive penalty-killing runs ended on Saturday when they allowed a pair of power play goals in the second period on penalties to Brandon Carlo (interference) and Lohrei (boarding). Admittedly, the Carlo call was a complete flop by Larkin that may have been the “adversity” that Montgomery was referencing in his postgame comments, but it means the B’s usually have to be the team that allowed just a single power play goal in the first 10 games of the season while killing off 38-of-39 power plays for the opposition.
If they’re not, then they’re in big trouble.
“We didn’t come out on top tonight, but we’re going to learn from this and continue to move forward,” said Carlo. “We’re fully expecting teams to come at us with everything that they have, and we love that challenge. That’s something that’s going to prepare us later on [in the season] and we embrace that opportunity.
“We know we are, and we want to continue to get better. If we challenge ourselves, we’re going to continue to grow, and it will help us get wins.”
In all the Bruins were whistled for 11 penalties in Saturday’s loss, including a bench minor for abuse of the officials, and that’s far too many even if the number was inflated when things got out of hand late in the third period. Six of the 11 penalty calls were either stick infractions or holding calls that are usually called when a defensive team is trailing the play or using their stick rather than moving their feet.
It’s also far too many PP chances allowed to a team like the Red Wings that have a clear weapon with their man advantage unit. That was obvious in the second period when Lucas Raymond and Jake Walman both found the back of the net on power play strikes.
The bottom line: The Boston Bruins are making it more difficult on themselves with some of the penalties they are regularly taking, and the extra effort expended when they have to kill off those power play chances. The B’s are tied for seventh most in the league with 57 penalties taken this season and they have the second-worst penalties drawn/penalties taken ratio this year with a minus-10 mark.
The only team worse off in that category is the Anaheim Ducks.
Clearly, it’s going to be less of an issue than it might be against a hockey club with a leaky penalty kill unit, but it’s a bad team habit to constantly be swimming upstream while down a man. Just as the Boston Bruins clearly aren’t good enough to pull away from other teams right now based on a downgraded offensive group from last season, they also aren’t good enough to be consistently taking lazy, ill-advised or just plain sloppy penalties when good, hard defense can be the alternative.
It’s been an overwhelmingly good season for the Black and Gold that’s got all the makings of something great if it continues, but the B’s really need to begin cleaning up their penalty situation. The loss to Detroit was another reminder of just that.