Bruins general manager Don Sweeney may have already decided his course of action for Friday’s trade deadline. But if he took his team’s performance in Nashville on Thursday in a vacuum, his thoughts would no doubt be sell, sell, sell.
Playing a Predators team that had already traded Michael Bunting earlier in the day, was holding out Ryan O’Reilly (eye) and had called up a handful of players from Milwaukee, the Bruins – desperate for points – laid an egg at Bridgestone Arena, losing 6-3. It wasn’t really that close, as the B’s let the game get away from them in a terrible second period.
“It just wasn’t good enough,” Charlie McAvoy told reporters in Nashville. “We got away from the things that allow us to have success. In every aspect, it just wasn’t good enough.”
The B’s were scored upon at 5-on-5. They gave up a power-play goal. They surrendered a brutal shorthanded goal. They were bad on offense and defense. They did not get the airtight goaltending that they had in the first three games after the Olympic break and their concerning road record dropped to 11-14-4.
But as bad as the performance was, McAvoy remains a staunch believer in the team as the league goes into it’s most uncertain day of the season.
“I’m just excited about this team. Everything we’ve done this year, how could you not be excited about it?” McAvoy said. “Going into this year, people had different expectations than we had for ourselves and now we’ve put ourselves in position to hopefully make the playoffs. But I think we have to understand now, and this is a conversation we’ll have, every game we play the rest of the way is the most important game of the year. I don’t know if we have that urgency yet. And we’re going to play teams that have that urgency.
“We’re going to play two of them in the next two games (Washington and Pittsburgh). This team tonight is trying to make the playoffs. We need to match that intensity. I don’t know if we’ve talked about that and maybe it’s shame on us. Every game the rest of the way is the most important if we’re trying to do what this team is capable of doing, which is making the playoffs. We’ve put ourselves in a great spot and that’s all that we can do. Then from here on out, we’ll see what happens.”
Perhaps what is most worrisome is their best player, David Pastrnak, has not looked like himself since coming back from Italy. Whether or not it’s the wear and tear of the season and the Olympics, Pastrnak is fighting the puck and, on Thursday, his bad decision put the B’s in a hole from which they could not extricate themselves.
Now, after the Blue Jackets beat the drain-circling Panthers, Columbus trails the B’s for the second wild-card spot by a single point. The B’s also travel to Columbus twice down the stretch.
With the Predators in flux on the eve of the deadline on Thursday, it was clear immediately that the Bruins weren’t ready to meet the moment.
The play was more or less even — the B’s held a 9-8 shot advantage – but they were down 1-0 through the opening 20 minutes.
The goal against was not a beauty. After the B’s had killed off a Nashville power play, the Preds gained the zone and defenseman Nic Hague stepped into a slapper just inside the blue and it broke though Joonas Korpisalo at 13:53. The B’s needed a save there, because Juuse Saros was on at the other end.
The Preds very nearly took a 2-0 lead shortly after the goal. Jordan Harris, who was playing his first NHL game since breaking his ankle in an Oct. 21 game, blew a tire in the corner and turned the puck over. It ended up on the stick of Joakim Kemell 10 feet out and all by himself. Korpisalo stoned him to keep it a one-goal deficit.
They very nearly tied it up in the final seconds, but Saros made an incredible save. On a 4-on-4, Pastrnak broke in on a 2-on-1 with Elias Lindholm. Pastrnak took it to the net, drew a penalty on Erik Haula and, with a pileup in front of the net, the puck squirted out to Lindholm. With Saros on his back and out of his crease, Lindholm had a ton of net at which to shoot but Saros made an incredible glove save with 0.8 seconds left on the clock.
The game was workable at that, but the B’s turned in an awful second period. They started the period on a 4-on-3 power play but it blew up in their face.
With Morgan Geekie’s stick in the air and cocked for a one-timer, Pastrnak telegraphed the cross-ice that Nick Perbix easily sniffed out. He deflected it out to open ice and chased it down for a partial break. He picked up Matthew Wood, who just got out of the box as did Mark Kastelic, and Perbix dished it over to Wood for the goal at 1:24.
But the B’s got another power play a couple of minutes later and this time they wasted no time in capitalizing. Lindholm won the faceoff back to Charlie McAvoy, who dished to a Geekie for a blistering one-timer at 3:30. That cut the deficit in half and was Geekie’s career-high 34th goal.
The Preds didn’t fold. They regained their two-goal lead at 10:18 simply by sending bodies to the net. Brady Skjei flung the puck toward the cage, it bounced off Haula at the side of the net and dropped in behind Korpisalo.
The B’s kept digging the hole. It look like the B’s had scored when Sean Kuraly’s long shot got past Saros. It was immediately waved off for goalie interference on Tanner Jeannot and the contact was deemed enough to put Jeannot in the box for two minutes. At the end of the advantage, Filip Forsberg sniped a shot through Marat Khusnutdinov and, at 4-1, the game was getting away from the B’s at 12:37.
Wood scored his second of the game at 14:44 when he deflected home a Roman Josi shot. The B’s challenged for goalie interference but it failed and they had to kill another penalty, which they did. But the game was pretty much settled.
McAvoy got one back at 6:05 of the third. With that, the B’s finally showed some urgency but could not capitalize again until Viktor Arvidsson blasted shot through Saros to cut it to a mere two goals with 4:28 remaining in the third.
Korpisalo was pulled with 2:45 left but Luke Evangelista ended it with an empty-netter.
