It’s simply not good enough.
The Bruins had high hopes that things would be different against the Florida Panthers this season after making some major roster upgrades this past summer, but things don’t feel any different after Boston has now lost twice to the Panthers amidst the first four games of the regular season.
This time around it was an undisciplined 4-3 loss to the Panthers on Monday afternoon at TD Garden where penalties, mental mistakes and lost battles conspired to put the Bruins on the losing side of the ledger once again. The frustration of it all and the way the B’s lost the game resulted in Jim Montgomery’s shortest postseason media session of the season where he clearly wasn’t happy with a lot of what he saw.
Things veered off the rails in the first period when AJ Greer blasted David Pastrnak from behind in a hit that went unpenalized, and Pavel Zacha jumped in to defend his Czech linemate. That was all perfectly fine, but after that, the Bruins seemed to lose their discipline and start chasing hits to get even.
“They are winning the mental side of the battle on us,” admitted Montgomery of a Florida team that always seems to have the B’s number. “Pasta got hit and I loved what [Pavel Zacha] did going in and defending him. But the penalties after that? It’s all undisciplined. It’s all four games that we’ve taken at least four minors. You can’t win hockey games that way.
“Then we can’t lose as many battles as we do. They are the standard for winning battles in the NHL right now. We’re not up to that level yet and we have to vastly improve to get up to that level.”
What kind of undisciplined play is Montgomery talking about?
Well, in the immediate aftermath of the hit on Pastrnak there was a sequence where Charlie McAvoy threw a nice, heavy hit on Carter Verhaeghe that dropped him to the ice, but then followed it up with a series of ill-advised cross-checks that finally got the ref’s attention for a penalty. Of course, the Panthers almost immediately scored on the power play that made it a very costly mistake by McAvoy.
Then much later in the game the Bruins were pushing in a one-goal game with Jeremy Swayman pulled, and David Pastrnak took a slashing call for chopping down on a Panthers player holding the puck. This happened just one game after Pastrnak took a similar slashing call on a puck battle where he again chopped down on a puck-handler that knocked the stick right out of his hands.
Plays like that hurt the Black and Gold against a Panthers team that came ready to play, and they were compounded by some puck management mistakes by youngsters Mason Lohrei and Matt Poitras that led to goals against as well.
After being one of the most penalized teams in the NHL last season with a negative differential between penalties taken and drawn, the Bruins lead the league with 28 penalties taken – including a whopping 26 minor penalties in four games – and hold a minus-4 penalty differential again this season. There isn’t another NHL team that’s been called for over 20 minor penalties thus far this season, and currently the Bruins have 10 more minor penalties than every other NHL team not-named-the-Florida-Panthers, who currently sit second in the league with 19 minor penalties this far.
Clearly some of this early penalty problem is because the Bruins and Panthers have each taken a lot of penalties in a couple of very physical, intense early season meetings, but it feels like the general lack of discipline for the Black and Gold is a constant, recurring issue that hasn’t been fully addressed.
Little things early in the season, like McAvoy throwing the net off the moorings for a delay of game penalty, and Marchand taking a similarly strange delay of game penalty for firing a puck into the netting in the offensive zone, have seemed to reveal pockets where disciplined play hasn’t always been there.
The other problem in defeat?
The B’s got goals from Lohrei and Brandon Carlo as offensive contributions from the back end, and they also got a deflection from Johnny Beecher at the net-front that gave Boston’s fourth line another goal early in the season. In fact, fourth-line center Mark Kastelic finished with three assists in the Monday afternoon loss in what’s been a tremendously impressive start to the season, but it was a really quiet afternoon for guys like Pastrnak (two shots on net), Brad Marchand (two shots on net) and Elias Lindholm (one shot on net) when Boston’s best players really need to show up against the Panthers.
“I’m really happy with the bottom-6 [forwards]. The fourth line has been really, really impressive,” said Montgomery. “They’re just doing their role. The guys in the top-6 aren’t doing their role, those guys [in the bottom-6] are doing their role.”
Beecher had a very solid game with a goal, two points and a plus-3 rating in 13:47 and scored a goal by fighting to get to the front of the net to go along with two shot attempts, two hits and 7-of-9 faceoff wins. But even he seemed to be picking up the message that Montgomery was sending out their postgame, despite Beecher and Co. being the guys that didn’t have much to hang their collective heads about.
“The team that comes out on top is the one that outcompetes the other [one], and wins all the small areas and battles,” said Beecher. “They got the upper edge on us today and it’s something that we go back, learn from and move forward and get better.”
The message was clear.
The Bruins have some work to do if they hope to unseat the Panthers later in the year after Florida has ended their playoff lives in each of the last two postseasons. For now, though, the Bruins will need to focus on other challenges as they won’t see Florida again until much, much later in the season.