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If you want to know how the Boston Bruins’ night went in game one of their five-game Western Conference road swing, goaltender
Tuukka Rask’s reaction after Vancouver’s fourth goal of the night said it all.
Seconds after
Chris Kelly’s third-period strike, bringing the Black and Gold within one of the Canucks, the Bruins deployed their fourth line and
Adam McQuaid and
Dennis Seidenberg.
19 seconds into their shift, Seidenberg sent a pass across the slot, right to a Vancouver skater, and into the back of the net. Rask, the victim of some straight-up deplorable defensive play in front of him, threw his hands up in an ultimate realization of “What was that and why does it continue to happen?”
It’s a microcosm of the B’s season. In their fourth loss in the last five games, a 5-2 final in Vancouver, it was another night of self-inflicted wounds and poor decisions in their own that burned the Bruins.
Almost all of the Canucks’ goals came on simply inexcusable mistakes, too.
Shawn Matthias was the happy recipient of ‘em all, too, recording the first NHL hat trick of his career, while
Radim Vrbata and
Jannik Hansen (empty-net) added goals of their own. Vancouver came at the Bruins with a hard forecheck from their wingers -- especially Kassian -- and really forced the Boston defense corp to treat the puck like a grenade.
After the loss, punches were not held. Boston coach
Claude Julien called the turnovers that led to Vancouver goals ‘mind-boggling’, while Rask said that you’re taught not to make those passes in pee-wee.
The loss came with other familiar angles, too. The Boston power play once again went 0-for-3 on the night (they put just five shots on net in six total minutes of power play time), while Julien was once again forced to juggle his top-nine in an effort to find a spark. Or something. Anything.
Reilly Smith, who after tonight has just two goals in his last 24 games (and just one in his last 18 games), was bumped back up to the first line, while David Pastrnak dropped down to the third line with Chris Kelly and Carl Soderberg. That put Loui Eriksson with Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand. Still, nothing seemed to go Boston’s way.
It’s clear as day that frustration has set in with this bunch, and it’s hard to find an actual answer.
Julien, for whatever reason, just can’t get this team to play the way he wants to. Or at least close to the level they need to in order to make an actual run at their third Stanley Cup Final appearance since 2011.
Think about this-- After the loss, Julien told NESN that this is probably the most frustrated he’s been as an NHL coach. This is a coach that was fired by the New Jersey Devils a week before the playoffs. This was a coach that led the 2010 Bruins to a monumental 0-3 collapse. He was behind the bench when the 2013 Bruins lost the Stanley Cup in less than 30 seconds. To say that this team is more frustrating him more than those moments did is an unbelievable sign of this team’s increasingly maddening inconsistencies.
The good news in all of this? The Florida Panthers, the team on the B’s heels by four points, lost tonight.
That’s not really going to make the Black and Gold sleep any better, though.
Random thoughts and notes (entirely about the Boston defense)
- It will absolutely blow my mind if
Adam McQuaid and
Dennis Seidenberg are ever on the ice at the same time for the rest of this season, let alone the rest of this trip. These guys are just not a good match for one another, and we’ve been over it before. They both play a heavy, shot-blocking style. They can’t move the puck to save their lives. And watching them try to handle aggressive forechecks is a nightmare.
But what’s a real fix? You can’t force
Kevan Miller into a top-pairing situation just because McQuaid-Seidenberg don’t mesh together, but that’s really what happens when Julien breaks ‘em up.
- If you ask me, you don’t even need to dress both McQuaid and Miller at the same time. They’re redundant. They’re both best served as No. 5/No. 6 defensemen who bring a bit more muscle opposite Torey Krug. Asking them to be more than that puts a real strain on the defense.
- It’s hard to imagine that Matt Bartkowski has been a healthy scratch for 17 straight games now. You’re telling me that the B’s couldn’t use his mobility and skating on that second pairing? That seems unlikely. Even if it's for just a game to send a message to the rest of the squad. It’s funny, too, because if and when Bartkowski draws back into the lineup, he’ll make a bad read or turn the puck over and everybody will scream that this is why he’s scratched in the first place.
- Two counterpoints to that one: Sometimes you’ll turn the puck over. But that’s because the puck is on your stick as you make your way up ice. How often can you say that about McQuaid and Seidenberg? These guys are chasing far too often, and when they do have the puck, it’s coming off their stick with a hurried pass from behind their own goal line and often hanging their goaltender out to dry. And look at the gaps between games for Bartkowski-- Oct. 28 to Nov. 15., Dec. 4 to Dec. 19. And now Dec. 31 to ________. Kinda hard to develop any semblance of consistency when you’re riding the bench for literal weeks at a time, you’d say.
- The more you watch the 2014-15 Boston Bruins, the more you realize that they need a top-four defenseman more than they need a top-nine right-winger. This team just does not have a second pairing. That will not take you anywhere close to beyond the first (maybe second) round of the postseason this season.
- Here’s a fun argument you probably don’t want to have-- Knowing what you know now (and that throws an obvious corkscrew in this argument, I know), would you rather have Seidenberg at his current contract ($4 million cap-hit) ‘til 2018 or
Johnny Boychuk for six years after this for a total of about $30 million?
Up next
The Bruins will make their way to Calgary for a Monday night showdown with the upstart Flames. It will be the first meeting 2014-15 between the two. Led by Boston College alum Johnny Gaudreau, the Flames have a plus-17 goal differential (second in the Pacific Division), and 63 points in 55 games this year.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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