The Boston Bruins have a growing, chronic problem when playing games on the road. They are, quite simply, a bad hockey team away from the friendly confines at TD Garden this season.
It’s something they are abundantly aware of at this point with a 9-14-3 record overall away from TD Garden, and because their absolute worst losses this season have come on the cold, unforgiving road when the Bruins have simply fallen apart once things started spiraling away from them.
The “fall apart” phenomenon plagued the Black and Gold on the road again on Tuesday night as they dropped an embarrassing 7-2 loss to the lowly Buffalo Sabres at KeyBank Center that included another ugly third period. The Bruins now have a 66-103 ratio of goals scored to goals against this season on the road for an ugly, ugly minus-37 goal differential that includes blowout losses to Dallas, Winnipeg, Carolina, New Jersey and Buffalo where the Bruins uncharacteristically had very little pushback.
“I think mainly on the road the in-game responses just haven’t been there this season,” admitted Mason Lohrei. “It’s just mainly execution and playing simple. When things start to go wrong you can’t start to try to play 1-on-1 and make plays that aren’t there.
“We just need to stick to what we do best, and I think sometimes that just gets away from us.”
The good news is that the Bruins are still in a Stanley Cup playoff spot even after all of these humbling losses, and the silver lining is that Charlie McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm are poised to return to a Bruins defensemen corps that looked like they were leaking oil against Tage Thompson and the Sabres.
Nikita Zadorov, in particular, had a tough night (minus-3 and had Tage Thompson fire a laser beam goal with a shot that went right through his legs) for the Bruins and ended his evening prematurely when he picked a fight with JJ Peterka in the closing minutes of the third period when the game was, for all intents and purposes, all over. It felt like Zadorov had seen enough and was going to leave a lasting impression in defeat. To be honest, it might have been better if more Bruins players decided to go out with a fight instead of simply accepting a road smackdown from the last-place team in the Atlantic Division.
Zadorov has not had many good nights of his Bruins tenure so far but tonight was arguably the worst, and this was the cherry on top. What was the point of this? pic.twitter.com/T3eKfsWxhN
— Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) January 29, 2025
The bad news is that it looks and feels like it’s a severe confidence problem with the Bruins when it comes to performing on the road where the hockey team descends into a shell-shocked haze once things start to go wrong for them away from home ice.
“I think the biggest thing right now is just sticking with it on the road. I feel like at home we’ve developed a really strong mindset where, even if we get down by a goal or two, we just stay with it,” said Joe Sacco, when asked about the B’s road struggles after Monday practice ahead of another sagging effort against Buffalo one day later. “We’ve had some comebacks in the third period at home where our guys have really dug in, and they’ve been determined. So that same focus and that same mindset has to be there on the road as well.
“We can’t let things get away from us and I feel like that’s happened to us a bit on the road. We’ve got to make sure that we reel it back in, reset, shift our focus…whatever it is that you want to call it. But we need to understand that we’re still in a hockey game and not let it get away from us. I think that’s something that we can all do a better job of. You look at some of the other things on the road. Matchups you can’t control. At some point it’s just irrelevant and you need to find a way to be a stronger team on the road.”
That is really unlike any recent Bruins teams in terms of cracking and breaking so much on the road, but the flip side of this split personality hockey team is that the B’s have been a pretty excellent team on home ice this season.
Predictably, some of the younger Bruins players have struggled a bit playing games in hostile environments on the road this season. Mason Lohrei scored a nifty, skill goal to open things up promisingly on Tuesday night in Buffalo and he was actually one of the better D-men in the loss, but he’s also piled up a tough minus-13 rating on the road in 24 games this season. Vinni Lettieri had a brutal offensive blue line turnover that led to a killer JJ Peterka goal in the third period right after the Bruins had scored to make it a 4-2 game.
Tage Thompson and JJ Peterka BOTH had hat tricks 👀
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) January 29, 2025
Here's all 6 goals 🍿🎩 pic.twitter.com/HWMC9f3uxu
“It’s frustrating some of the games lately on the road [where] we just need to gather ourselves. Be it a goal or a bad bounce, it’s gotten away from us quick on the road,” said Andrew Peeke. “You just have to realize that there will be things that will happen, and their crowd will get into it. We see that at home, and we just need to take that [mindset] to the road.”
And Matt Poitras struggled with a minus-2 and just one shot on net in the road loss to Buffalo while he’s been saddled with a minus-6 rating in nine road games this season, with the B’s much less able to shelter their young players on the road where they lose the first change. Still, there have also been veterans with road struggles as well as David Pastrnak (minus-13), Trent Frederic (minus-11) and Charlie Coyle (minus-10) have all been subpar on many occasions away from home this season.
“You’re going to make mistakes in hockey over the course of a game. They happen. But it’s how we respond right after those mistakes. Be it turning pucks over in the offensive zone and then not coming back into our D-zone and supporting our coverage during line changes,” said Sacco. “Getting a couple of goals then obviously not good responses from us in our next shift. They got goals that next shift, so I would say game management was probably the most disappointing there [in the loss].
“You have to respect your opponent, especially offensively. We just weren’t good enough in those areas, on the puck or off the puck.”
The weak track record on the road is another troubling sign when it comes to how this Bruins team might perform in the Stanley Cup playoffs where they even to get that far, but they still have time to figure it out before this kind of flaw dooms them this season as a blowout loss to the Sabres should be a significant wakeup call for this group.