The Boston Bruins didn’t have anything to show for their strong effort against the Atlantic-leading Montreal Canadiens in their last game, a 2-0 loss on TD Garden ice this past Saturday. But a Monday night visit from the Pittsburgh Penguins came with a bit more success (and controversy) for the Black and Gold, even if the final result was a bittersweet, 3-2 overtime loss at the hands of Evgeni Malkin and company.

“You gotta score two goals every night to get one, it’s tough to win hockey games,” Claude Julien said after the overtime loss, pushing the B’s to 13-9-1 this year. “We got some tough calls against us and our guys played hard right ‘til the end. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that second point that I thought we deserved.”

The tough calls the Bruins’ bench boss is referring were two disallowed goals against the Bruins, one called back from Patrice Bergeron in the first, and the other from Carl Soderberg in the second.

Julien’s not crazy, either, given the straight-up confusion that seemed to surround these calls.

On the first one, the referee closest to the next call Bergeron’s strike a goal. The other three referees said no, noting that Bergeron hit the puck out of the air with a high stick. The majority ruled. (By the way, you know you’re in for an adventure when a referee begins his explanation with ‘Well, first of all...’) The would-be goal (gif’d below) was a push for me. At first glance, at real time and at the arena, it looked good. But upon further review, Bergeron’s stick looked a little high, but I’m not sure if it’d be enough to overturn the goal entirely. That’s where and why the referees’ original call or three no’s and yes appeared to rule.



And on the second one, it looked like Soderberg redirected the puck into the net with his glove, an obvious no-goal. But when watched again and again (and again), it looked as if Soderberg attempted to glove the puck, but missed and watched it hit his body and go into the net. That would, in theory, be a good goal.

“On that first goal, the closest referee calls it a goal. And then it’s no goal because the three furthest ones think it’s a high stick, so I guess that’s what’s frustrating in my mind. I don’t know what the league looked at. When I looked at the replay myself it looked more inconclusive,” Julien said. “ Now, they may contradict me and say they had a better angle from where they were, but that’s how it looked to me. I think that’s a little frustrating, especially the number of goals that we’ve had turned back on us this year. With what we’re going through, we’re working hard to score goals and yet you get those taken away. We had a couple of tough calls on us tonight too. It gets frustrating with the guys working so hard, feeling like you play well enough to win and you come out of here losing in overtime when you thought you scored enough goals to win.”

The Bruins can hang their heads about the disallowed goals, but it’s not why they lost on Monday night. Instead, it was yet another slow start and three-line effort that ultimately led to the B’s fall.

For the eighth time in their last ten games, the night started with the Bruins surrendering the first goal, this one coming off the stick of Sidney Crosby at the end of an absolutely disastrous shift. In fact, it was a shift that was supposed to go to the Bruins’ newest creation -- a line featuring Jordan Caron, Alexander Khokhlachev and David Pastrnak (his NHL debut) -- but was switched to the Bergeron trio when Julien saw the Pens’ top line of Nick Spaling, Patric Hornqvist, and Crosby hop over.

“I don’t think it’s done on purpose, obviously. I think considering where we’re at and what we have, the challenges that we have, that’s not my priority,” Julien noted of his club’s recent struggles to strike first. “I think my priority is to see us compete every game and give ourselves a chance to win and I think that’s what we did tonight. We even had that lead, even though we didn’t score the first goal.”

And about that Caron-Khokhlachev-Pastrnak line…

Did it play? Well, for a bit. They had about two minutes of play in the first. Another two in the middle frame. And hardly at all in the third period of play. This forced the Bruins to roll three lines against a quicker Pittsburgh squad, and that was painfully apparent for the B’s by the end of this one. Just look at the ice time figures for some of the B’s forwards; Gregory Campbell logged over 17 minutes. Danny Paille played over 15 minutes. Soderberg and Loui Eriksson both logged over 18 and a half minutes. Patrice Bergeron, a player that sat in the box by way of a penalty against at one point, played over 21 minutes. That’s a monstrous workload, and you could tell that the Bruins were spent by the midway point of the third.

Compare those figures to Caron’s 3:35, Khokhlachev’s 2:53, and Pastrnak’s 7:53. Hell, add it all up and that’s 14 minutes and 21 seconds of combined time on ice. Or, 88 seconds fewer than Simon Gagne’s ice time.

You can talk about trust, or the tightness of this game both in the defensive end and on the scoreboard, but you’re not doing your team any favors when you decide that you literally can’t play a line. You’re burning the candle at both ends. And again, the Bruins in heavy rotation were undeniably spent.

But that didn’t make Julien back down from his decision in his postgame meeting with the media.

“That’s coaching. That’s me coaching the way I felt I had to coach tonight,” Julien said.

And the ice time decrease for Khokhlachev, a player that’s looked effective when given opportunities?

“It’s coaching.”

That coaching also left a winded B’s squad falling behind on Malkin’s game-winning goal in overtime.

But in a game of disallowed goals and major minutes, there were more than a few positives for Boston.

One-- So, uh, how about this Pastrnak kid?

Making his National Hockey League debut, David Pastrnak, the Bruins’ first-round pick this year, showed a bit of why he’s a superstar prospect, but also why he’s started his year in the American Hockey League. At just 18 years old and barely 180 pounds, the Czech forward is uber-talented in the attacking zone, but it’s his ‘complete game’ that he needed fine-tuning, something that Julien was up front about from the start.

One of Pastrnak’s best moments came on a power play shift where the speedy right winger broke through into the attacking zone with an entry so pretty it made my ankles break from six floors above ice level. That sequence led to a great look that even saw No. 88 deflect a puck just wide of the Pittsburgh net. That sequence was followed up with a weak clearing attempt that could have ended a lot worse for Pastrnak and the Bruins had it not been for a quick-thinking save from Khokhlachev out of harm’s way.

But without a doubt, Pastrnak’s best shift came in a third period stint with Bergeron and Brad Marchand, where Pastrnak and Marchand were simply flying around the Penguins’ end, attacking their defensemen and Marc-Andre Fleury with speed they could hardly deal with. And had it not been for a few lucky bounces here and there, and some big stops from Fleury (a goalie that always plays well in Boston), there’s a great chance that this blog is talking about Pastrnak’s first NHL point.

Time will tell if he stays with the big club (another nine games and the Bruins burn a year off his entry-level deal), but the exuberant winger is certainly enjoying every second of his time with the big club.

“I’ve been happy for every minute, every second I’m on the ice and I try to do my best,” Pastrnak said after his NHL debut. “I think I like this kind of game [North American ice]. I’m getting used to it and I like this.”

He should get another look. But this time, he should probably, y'know, get some ice time. While Reilly Smith had a better game on that right wing of the Bergeron line, Pastrnak slid in there with an instant impact, and could be an interesting fit for a game or two. Just to see what you have and if it's worth keeping around for the long haul this season, of course.

Two-- Milan Lucic is finding rhythm with the Swedes

There’s a rumor out there that says the 6-foot-4 winger Milan Lucic is incapable of producing without David Krejci feeding him the puck. His sans Krejci numbers would back that up, too. But with Krejci out for the foreseeable future, the Bruins’ $6 million dollar man has to figure it out with somebody else. And in his second straight game with Soderberg and Eriksson, Lucic found the back of the net, capitalizing on a simply beautiful sequence between the three. It’s Lucic’s net-front presence that’s complemented Eriksson and Soderberg well, along with a booming physical presence that allows the Swedes to find space to move.

But that doesn’t mean that Lucic will find a permanent home with that line.

“I think that line’s been able to get [good games] out of him from playing with those two,” Julien said of Lucic and the Swedes. “But when Krejci comes back and [Chris] Kelly comes back, Kelly’s been good with that line too. So we’re gonna need more than just a couple of high-end productive lines here. So there’s probably a good chance, I’m gonna tell you right now, you’ll probably see him back with Krech.”

Until then, however, this looks like it’ll work.

Up next

The Bruins will be off until Friday night, when they play host to the Winnipeg Jets. It’ll certainly feel weird to not have the annual Black Friday matinee, though, won’t it?

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