An NHL team isn’t going to win much with sluggish starts and empty efforts at the tail end of hockey games, but that’s exactly what the Bruins ending up showing in a second disappointing road loss during an extended West Coast trip.
The B’s dropped a 5-1 decision to the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena on Thursday night where they were basically shorthanded for the first six minutes of the game, and then gave up three unanswered goals in a spiraling third period after essentially sagging once the Kraken scored and made it a 3-1 lead.
“First shift of the game and it’s a four-minute [penalty], and then right after we kill that off, we take a second penalty. Those aren’t good penalties and then you’re chasing the game again, which is hard to do in this league. After the first six minutes of the game where we were short-handed [three times], I thought our 5-on-5 game started to come around,” said Joe Sacco. “We generated, we had some opportunities, we had some looks. It just didn’t go in the back of the net for us tonight.”
One would have expected the Bruins to come out firing hard on all cylinders fresh off an embarrassing blowout loss to the Winnipeg Jets on the first leg of a grueling Western Conference road swing, but that is the polar opposite of what happened on a midweek evening in the Pacific Northwest.
Instead, David Pastrnak took a careless offensive-zone high-sticking penalty 16 seconds into the game and put the Bruins on an extended penalty kill. This is not the first time this season that No. 88 has taken an offensive zone penalty on the very first shift of the game and set a sloppy tone for what was to come afterward.
And it feels like it probably won’t be the last, either, unless some kind of accountability goes along with the carelessness.
The Kraken scored eight seconds into the PP with one of Oliver Bjorkstrand’s two goals in the game and Boston was again in scramble mode. They gave up one more just after killing off a Tyler Johnson tripping penalty and created an uphill battle for themselves with self-inflicted wounds that have been a chronic issue throughout this season.
“We’ve got to clean it defensively, big time. We can’t be giving up five and six goals a game,” said Marchand, who scored Boston’s only goal on a penalty shot and was essentially their best player throughout the contest. “That is not the type of team we have. We got some pucks on net. We had some good opportunities and a push once we got down 2-0, but we still need to be better.
“We just put ourselves in a really bad spot. Obviously, guys aren’t trying to take penalties, but when you get down 2-0 that quickly in a game it really is deflating, and it gives the other team a ton of momentum.
“There was obviously a lot of time to come back, and we thought we were going to get a second one after we got the first one. But their goalie made some big saves, and they weathered the storm and then we just kind of fell apart [in the third period].”
And therein lies the rub for the Black and Gold. Marchand made a great play, and the Bruins actually outshot the Kraken even if the bulk of their shots on net were of the perimeter variety rather than interior Grade-A scoring chances.
But for the second straight game the Bruins’ game – and their iron will to compete – more or less disintegrated in the third period once it felt like the players thought the game was out of reach. Vince Dunn whacked a puck out of mid-air after Charlie McAvoy had blocked a Jared McCann shot on net, and Seattle got a fortunate bounce that extended them a two-goal lead once the NHL situation room ruled that it wasn’t a high stick.
VINCE DUNN HOMERUN! 🚨 pic.twitter.com/h1r51HYXOA
— Seattle Kraken (@SeattleKraken) December 13, 2024
The Bruins are now a minus-15 in the third period this season, which ranks them third worst in the NHL ahead of only the Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders. Granted some of that is due to Boston being a putrid minus-8 in the third periods of the back-to-back road losses to Winnipeg and Seattle, but it also indicates the B’s are exhibiting some signs of fragility when it comes to holding strong and avoiding games totally getting away from them.
Consistent flaws like third period struggles and softness defensively may not be enough to keep a talented Bruins team out of the playoffs, but they are exactly the kind of team imperfections that will lead to quick postseason exits when the going gets tough.
It felt like that kind of realization was going through the B’s captain’s mind as he analyzed what just happened in Seattle, and what it means to their long-term game as the Bruins aren’t very far from the midpoint of the regular season.
“If you’re looking for positives you could say that we generated more shots than they did, but they had a lot of Grade-A [scoring chances], it looked like to me,” admitted Marchand. “It felt like [Joonas] Korpisalo had to make a lot of really big saves and we can’t be giving up five goals. That [kind of stuff] definitely doesn’t make me feel better about the game.”
It won’t get any easier against a Vancouver Canucks team, on Saturday night, that’s been playing better hockey as of late, and old friend Jake DeBrusk as he’s caught fire offensively after potting the game-winner in the last matchup between these two teams.
But that’s the harsh reality right now for a Bruins team that’s good enough to still be in the Atlantic Division playoff structure but is clearly not as good as some of their recent iterations based on what we’ve seen through the first 31 games of a turbulent, erratic regular season full of highs and lows.