There have obviously been times during this long, NHL regular season when the Bruins have been at less than their best, whether it was due to the taxing schedule, simply overlooking a weak sister opponent or just not being at their best in a competitive league.
It hasn’t happened often obviously given their 47-19-15 record headed into Tuesday night’s regular-season finale, but the longest stretch of listless B’s performances happened coming out of the NHL All-Star break. It was a pretty clear-cut situation of a playoff team with a cushion running headlong into hungry hockey teams clawing for postseason spots, and it wasn’t pretty until the B’s leveled up their own game to match that late season intensity a couple of weeks ago.
Winning five out of six games against Florida, Carolina, Nashville, Washington and Tampa Bay down the stretch allayed a lot of concerns that the Bruins might not be fully prepared for the playoff onslaught.
That’s all to say none of it was an excuse for Monday night’s 2-0 loss to the Washington Capitals at Verizon Wireless Arena where it felt like the Bruins weren’t particularly concerned with the final results.
John Carlson buried a high point shot past Jeremy Swayman stick-side in the first period and that was enough to defeat a Bruins team before Nic Dowd tacked on the exclamation point empty netter late in the third. The play happened as a result of Brad Marchand getting his pocket picked, which was kind of par for the game's entire course.
HOLY SHAMOLEY JUDY pic.twitter.com/RJt4mYBGE9
— Washington Capitals (@Capitals) April 16, 2024
The real story was the B’s complete lack of cohesive team hockey for pretty much the entire 60-minute hockey game.
It was Boston exhibiting some of their worst habits: careless turnovers, a stunning lack of emotion and zero consistent presence in the offensive zone with Swayman left to hold it all together in a game that could have easily been a three or four-goal loss for the Black and Gold when it was all said and done.
The Bruins changed around their PP units prior to the game with Marchand and Charlie McAvoy dropping down to the second unit, and Kevin Shattenkirk getting a chance to run point with the top group. But then the B’s never actually did enough effort-wise during the entire game to earn even a single power play chance to get an in-game look at what the tweaked man advantage combinations could do on the ice.
On the other side, there was a Washington hockey club that still clutching and grabbing for their Stanley Cup playoff invite, and the difference on every level was striking. The Capitals, Red Wings, Penguins and Flyers all go into their final game of the regular season with a puncher’s chance of claiming the final wild-card spot in the East, and Washington played with that level of desperation on Monday.
The Bruins absolutely did not.
“[The Capitals] looked like a team that was fighting for a playoff spot,” said Charlie Coyle. “We looked like a team that was already in the playoffs. That wasn’t good. We didn’t have our sense of urgency that we usually have and winning loose pucks, winning our battles, we didn’t do nearly enough of that.”
In fact, somebody with a bent for conspiracy theories might have watched Monday night’s game and wondered whether the Bruins were on some level mailing in their effort to avoid facing the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round. The Bruins currently sit in first place in the Atlantic Division but haven’t clinched the top spot in the division with the Florida Panthers sitting one point behind them in the standings with one game to play apiece for both bitter divisional rivals.
There are obvious advantages to facing a perpetually underachieving Maple Leafs group in the first round of the playoffs rather than going up against the experienced, dangerous Lightning, with Andrei Vasilevskiy in net, right out of the gate.
To a layperson, it might have looked like the Bruins were doing their part to manipulate which team they might face in the first round with a nod toward preferring the Leafs over the Bolts.
Whether it’s Toronto or Tampa Bay, it’s s going to be a challenging first-round series for a Bruins hockey club with more weaknesses (struggling power play, blown third-period leads, faceoffs) than last season’s record-breaking juggernaut that bowed out to the Panthers in the first round. The bottom line, though, is that it will be a virtual impossibility to advance in the playoffs if the B’s in any way resemble the group that simply punted away two points to the Capitals on Monday night.
"I thought (Washington) played with a lot of desperation,” said Jim Montgomery to NESN after the game was over. “I thought their checking skills were good. I thought they managed the puck well. I didn't think we were at their level.”
The offensive side of the ledger was certainly the most problematic in a game that was still 1-0 in the closing minutes.
The Bruins managed just four shots on net apiece in the first and second period and finished with a whopping 10 skaters that couldn’t muster up a single shot on net. David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy combined for eight shots on net that registered as half of Boston’s 16-shot output on a night when the Black and Gold didn’t break a sweat offensively.
When it was all over even the B’s bench boss didn’t sound particularly worked up about the underwhelming B’s product he saw on the ice.
"I'm not going to put too much into it, to be honest,” said Montgomery. “We didn't play well. Yeah, we start [the playoffs on] Saturday, we've had a real good string of games against real good teams, so I think our team is a confident team that didn't give our best effort tonight."
The expectation is that the Bruins will rest some of their best players in Tuesday night’s regular-season finale against the Ottawa Senators with 35-year-old Marchand perhaps due for a rest, and guys like McAvoy and Pastrnak also deserving of a rest ahead of the looking postseason. That might just be the prudent hockey thing to do after Patrice Bergeron suffered a back injury while playing in a meaningless Game No. 82 of the regular season last year in Montreal, an injury that ultimately helped seal their collective fate in last spring’s Stanley Cup playoffs.
With that in mind, the Bruins called up Jayson Megna from Providence ahead of Tuesday night’s final regular season game.
The Bruins seem to have learned some lessons from last year’s postseason experience based on the way they’ve treated this entire regular season, and that goes from Montgomery’s coaching all the way to the leadership group within the Boston dressing room. Perhaps that’s why we saw what we saw from the B’s Monday night in Washington, but nobody can be too sure until we evaluate what the Bruins look like when things started up for real on Saturday against either the Lightning or the Maple Leafs.