The Boston Bruins have reached the “out of answers” portion of their underachieving, underwhelming opening month to the NHL regular season.
After a decent, winning effort against the Maple Leafs last weekend, the B’s sank right back down into mediocrity with a thoroughly lukewarm performance in a 2-0 shutout loss to a not-great Philadelphia Flyers team at TD Garden on Tuesday night.
It truly felt, watching the game, like the Flyers wanted to hand the game back to the Bruins in the third period when it was just a one-goal contest totally up for grabs, but the Bruins didn’t want to seize it while scratching for just three shots on net before the Flyers ultimately nabbed an empty net score. The loss leaves the Bruins in last place in the Atlantic Division with a 4-5-1 record and a second-worst minus-7 goal differential ahead of just the Montreal Canadiens.
For a team with Stanley Cup aspirations, that is a truly alarming start for everybody involved.
Afterward, Jim Montgomery was proclaiming it’s “not good enough” while also shouldering his share of the blame for a team that didn’t look all that excited to play this one.
“We’re not making plays,” said Montgomery. “We’re not doing enough to generate high danger scoring chances whether that’s a will to get to those areas or not the right game plan…we’re all culpable with not coming out with a victory tonight.
“I think on every team, your best players…your star players have to carry the load offensively. Those are the players that are out on the power play and right now that offense isn’t materializing for us.”
Some frustrated fans will throw their hands up and try to blame Bruins management while saying that this is a big, slow hockey club that can’t keep up with the NHL pace. It’s an easy default until you actually peel back what’s happening and realize nearly everybody on the B’s roster is vastly underachieving to their usual career norms right now. Every top-9 forward outside David Pastrnak isn’t producing much of anything offensively with Elias Lindholm getting the best scoring looks on Tuesday when he couldn’t get a couple of point-blank looks past Flyers goalie Samuel Ersson.
Ersson, by the way, became the first Flyers goaltender in almost 20 years to shut out the Black and Gold on the Garden ice dating back to the immortal Antero Nittymaki.
So much of what the Bruins are doing right now is exactly what happens when they struggle to meet their standard. The B’s are way too passive on the power play where it appeared the Flyers shot-blocking efforts (28 blocked shots) frustrated them, and there wasn’t nearly enough intrepid effort to transport the puck to the Flyers net.
Afterward, the Bruins were just basically admitting that they needed to be better and fumbled away a chance to build some momentum after the win over the Leafs.
“We have to take ownership to be better out there,” said Hampus Lindholm. “There are lots of things. When something isn’t really going your way, you try to look at everything, but sometimes it’s really simple stuff that is going to get you out of it. You go to hard areas and put pucks in good spots and it’s a funny game where the puck sometimes seems to be finding you and going in the net.
“This game can come much easier when you’re playing on your intuition out there. Also, you’ve got to take ownership. Nobody is going to hand you anything for free in this league and you’ve got to work for it. It starts with winning battles and going from there by taking the puck to the net rather than relying on a tap-in. You need to work for it and get that mindset as a team. That’s how we get out of it.”
So where do the Bruins go from here?
Well, they’ve waived Riley Tufte and sent him down to Providence and the runway has been cleared to sign Tyler Johnson in the short term. Adding another veteran forward with some offensive ability can obviously do nothing but help, but it feels like the Bruins are going to need a whole lot more to truly turn things around.
Right now, Cole Koepke (three goals, seven points), Johnny Beecher (two goals, six points) and Mark Kastelic (three goals, six points) are beyond critique, but even the stellar fourth line has slowed down in recent games after a hot start to the season. Pastrnak has six goals in 10 games (even though he hasn't been close to his best either) and Brad Marchand has managed six points even as he has just one goal, so the offensive production has been okay.
The problem is that Marchand is a minus-6, Pastrnak is a minus-4 and even worse guys like Charlie Coyle (minus-8), Trent Frederic (minus-7) and Morgan Geekie (minus-5) are non-existent offensively while not bringing enough defensively either. Montgomery called it a “puck pursuit” issue with the forwards earlier this week, with both the forecheck and backcheck pointed out as problem areas.
"Puck pressure. Our puck pressure last game was best it has been, but it's still not where it needs to be,” said Montgomery. “I would not come close to describing our team as relentless and that's where we want to get to. It’s more forwards working in the offensive zone and the neutral zone so that the defense can have better gaps.
“In the last 15 minutes of the third period [against Toronto], we really backed off and that is not what we want to be. Someone needs to be pressuring the puck. You just can’t let somebody on the other team carry the puck 10 or 15 feet [without pressure]…that should never happen with the way we want to play, and we just need to get better at that. We need to have a relentless pursuit attitude. We did a lot of good things with that in the first two periods, and we had our most Grade-A scoring chances 5-on-5 in a game [this season].”
The problem with all of that is it feels like it’s an effort and attitude issue. The Bruins talked quite a bit about wanting to be a relentless attack team like the Florida Panthers when they came together for training camp, and they have been the exact opposite in the early going with a passive group that’s shown a propensity for discipline mistakes, defensive breakdowns and simply not being on the same page offensively.
The goaltending has been okay, and it was again with Joonas Korpisalo only allowing one goal on 18 shots in Tuesday’s loss despite the Bruins defense giving up some Grade-A chances that Philly couldn’t convert. But there is so much more that needs to be improved around this Bruins team that it begins to make you wonder where the impetus for change is going to come from if there isn’t some kind of shakeup event coming down the pipe.