While cruising their way to a record-breaking NHL regular season last year, the Boston Bruins did not have much in the way of wakeup calls during the year.
Instead, they cruised on through while crushing team after team that left them woefully underprepared for the ravenously hungry Florida Panthers team awaiting them in the first round of the playoffs.
This season has been different, to be sure, even though the B’s are once again the top dog in the East. There have been some stark wakeup calls for the Black and Gold despite their gaudy 31-10-9 regular season record, and Tuesday night’s listless 4-1 loss to the Calgary Flames served as another one for a Bruins team clearly still pounding the snooze button coming out of the NHL All-Star break.
“We weren’t good enough. Our effort was poor,” said Jim Montgomery. “As a coaching staff you look inwardly, and you look at your preparation. You always think as a coach that your preparation is good, but obviously it wasn’t good enough. A lot of mental mistakes and a lot of physical mistakes and that’s a lack of real good preparation individually and collectively.
“I don’t think it was looking past the opponent. We just weren’t good. I was stressing just to play simple to start the game and we didn’t do that. Then we talked [after the first period] about moving our legs so our brains would follow because I didn’t think our brains were very good in the first. And just talked about dumping every puck in for the second period. We got a little bit better in the second, but [only] marginally.”
🎥 Coach Montgomery, Brad Marchand, Charlie McAvoy, and Pavel Zacha react following the #NHLBruins 4-1 loss to Calgary on Tuesday night: pic.twitter.com/xPhXm37egn
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) February 7, 2024
In a season where the first-place Bruins have been punitively bag skated during a practice earlier in the year and been the target of Montgomery’s criticism much more often than during last season’s magical campaign, they were once again knee-deep in adversity and this time failed the test.
The scuffling penalty kill (they’ve dropped to 10th in the league with an 82.1 percent success rate), surrendered a goal early in the first period and then Matt Grzelcyk and Kevin Shattenkirk had a tough breakdown in the D-zone later in the first to go down quickly by a 2-0 score. The Bruins PK has now allowed at least one PP goal in 14 of their last 21 games even as they were red-hot overall coming out of the Christmas break. Grzelcyk was on the ice for three of the four Calgary goals allowed and finished a team-worst minus-2 as he continues to struggle to maintain consistency.
There were pockets where the Bruins played decent hockey and they even halved the lead in the third period while on a 5-on-3 PP that saw Pavel Zacha rip a one-timer off a slick pass from David Pastrnak. But then the Bruins inexplicably took a too many men on the ice penalty while still on the power play, the second time that has happened in the last month, and any opportunity for a comeback was over.
That kind of mistake is on the coaching staff clearly getting their sea legs back as well against a Flames team full of players looking to hold onto their spots for next season.
The Calgary coup de grace was Massachusetts native Noah Hanifin speeding down the wing on the PP during a D-man rush and then flipped a backhander through Jeremy Swayman to make it a 4-1 final score. Not even Boston’s goaltending stood out in this game as it was flat effort all around from everybody on the roster.
“We weren’t good in any area. Their compete level was a lot higher than ours,” said Brad Marchand, who finished with zero shots on net in the loss. “We figured we would be a little rusty, but we just didn’t have the effort, unfortunately. So we need to group and better on Thursday.
“I’m a little surprised. We had two good days of practice, so I really don’t know what happened tonight. But we need to learn from it and a really good team [in the Vancouver Canucks] coming in next game that we’ve got to be prepared for. So we need to be a lot better.”
The Bruins were outplayed, outmuscled in the physical game and outcoached by a hungrier Calgary team that served as a reminder to the B’s that the final 32 games of the regular season are going to require more toughness, better execution and a stronger will to win than they showed in their first game back.
“We’re back to playing games and we’re the first-place team in our conference, so we’re going to get everyone’s best…even more so than we did before,” said Charlie McAvoy. “This is good for us to know what to expect going forward. It’s the first game out of the break so I’m not going to dwell on it too much, to be honest. There’s a lot of stuff we can work on, but we are nowhere near a finished product. There’s always room for improvement and we will get better from this.”
That was the most useful message to be taken by the Boston Bruins after it was all over.
But the loss to a bottom-dwelling Calgary team might also be the kind of necessary, humbling slap the B’s needed to alert them that they’re entering a different portion of the season. It was obvious each time the Flames ferociously attacked the Bruins in scrums around the net and left Marchand’s face beaten up postgame after a high stick to the mouth and an early Martin Prospisil elbow to the captain’s face during a first-period scrum.
Cheap hit by Martin Prospisil gets a major cross checking penalty and a game misconduct for jumping Brad Marchand. Things could get ugly tonight after this pic.twitter.com/cyJYYnaFfC
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) February 7, 2024
There was little pushback from the Bruins and nobody that individually stepped up emotionally and physically after one of the Flames players decked their captain. Instead, the Flames were consistently the aggressor on Tuesday night while the Bruins sat back and took it while still allowing two PP goals to the Flames when it was all said and done.
That kind of thing needs to change ahead of the Stanley Cup playoffs or it’s going to be another short run for the Black and Gold.
“I thought Calgary was physical,” admitted Montgomery. “I didn’t think we were physical.”
The Bruins need a lot more pushback in these kinds of games, just as they did last season in the playoffs against the Panthers. The good news is they are learning this now with two-plus months left in the regular season rather than getting surprised by it in the playoffs and can address the toughness and physicality issue at the NHL trade deadline.
That’s why the hope is that things can be much different for the Black and Gold this year, and perhaps we’ll learn about whether they are when they get a chance to respond against the best team in the Western Conference, the red-hot Vancouver Canucks, coming to town on Thursday night.