TORONTO — Few dismal losses shake out quite so cleanly, the culprit quite so clear amid the noise of a big-league back-and-forth. But Tuesday night, after what played out under the Scotiabank Arena lights, there was no mystery surrounding the sinking of the Boston Bruins.
Seven times in the evening, Jim Montgomery’s squad found themselves escorted to the penalty box. Three times, the penalized Bruin was forced to make the uncomfortable trek back to the bench as the goal horn sounded and the crowd rained cheers down on the home side.
But it wasn’t just the overall shellacking on the special-teams front that took the B’s down in this one. It was just how messy it all felt as it happened.
It started early for the visitors. Two-and-a-half minutes into the tilt, the Bruins were gifted a golden opportunity to build some early momentum when the Maple Leafs were tagged with a bench minor that sent Boston to the power play. Thirty seconds later, the chance was already squandered when a misplayed sequence in the offensive zone wound up with Charlie McAvoy splayed out near Toronto’s blue line, tripping up Mitch Marner and nullifying the man-advantage.
It was in the middle frame, though, that it all truly went off the rails.
First came Nikita Zadorov causing chaos in front of his own net, snowing his own goalie as Jeremy Swayman tried to deal with a Max Pacioretty floater, which escaped him for a moment amid the confusion. The big-bodied blue-liner followed that up by putting Pacioretty on the ice when the veteran came poking around for a rebound, and taking the opportunity to get in a few extra shots — some not-so-subtle payback for a Pacioretty check that sent Boston’s Andrew Peeke down the tunnel a period earlier.
Off went Zadorov to the box. Seconds into the ensuing power play, he was headed back onto the ice after Morgan Rielly whipped one in from the point for the game’s first goal.
Less than a minute later, it was David Pastrnak’s turn when the star winger caught Jake McCabe with a high stick on an offensive-zone faceoff.
Off to the box. A William Nylander snipe from the corner. 2-0, Toronto.
They weren’t done. Down a pair already after a miserable stretch, the Bruins kept digging when McAvoy was called for a hook on Nick Robertson to give the home side a third power play in less than five minutes.
The B’s escaped the third-man advantage unscathed but found even more special-teams futility in the final period. An early power-play chance of their own was nullified by a Brad Marchand tripping minor and a brief semblance of late Bruins momentum was quickly undone by the club’s seventh penalty, which ultimately gifted Toronto its third power-play marker on the night.
It’s far from a new issue for these Bruins. Through the season’s opening month, no club league-wide has taken as many penalties as the 79 Boston has amassed — seven of those coming in this game alone. No. 2 on that list isn’t particularly close — with the Bruins pushing 80, no other team in the league has collected more than 70.
Yet, despite what seems to be a clear area of concern for the club — and despite a tumultuous early-season stretch that saw Boston lose five of six, bag two shutout wins, and then get shut out themselves Tuesday — the Bruins seemingly see no reason to worry.
“Our group’s fine,” Montgomery said after the final buzzer sounded on a 4-0 loss. “We feel we’re getting better. Our habits and details are growing. You don’t like losing 4-0, they got three power-play goals — (but) we look at our five-on-five game, we don’t think we’re giving up that much.
“Offensively, we’re starting to build. We still didn’t get the o-zone time we’d love to have. But that’s a work in progress.”
Still, the coach can’t be thrilled about watching his club march to the box as often as they did Tuesday or have all season long.
“You know, there’s maybe a couple of penalties I think we could’ve avoided tonight. But in general I thought we drew a lot of penalties, by playing the right way at five-on-five,” Montgomery said. “Just, our power play didn’t have the success that theirs did.”
It’s perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the roller coaster identity the Bruins are cultivating. The B’s certainly did draw plenty of penalties themselves Tuesday, earning six power-play chances of their own. Big-picture, that trend has held true for them as well — the club’s drawn the most penalties in the league (75), just as they’ve taken the most.
But Tuesday’s loss seemed to show the flaw in the high-wire strategy. Both clubs wound up with myriad power-play chances — but one capitalized, and the other came up empty-handed — if they even made it to the end of the chance without taking another penalty of their own.
“Obviously, it’s frustrating,” top-unit mainstay Elias Lindholm said. “Their PP won them the game. So it’s frustrating when our PP can’t win a game for us. … I think we had looks, we had some chances. Sooner or later, it’s going to go our way.”
“We had some looks, but for the number of power plays that we got, we didn’t get it done,” added David Pastrnak. “Honestly, it was a tough loss today. I feel like we were right there for most of the game. Obviously special teams hurt us.
“You know, we didn’t do our job on the power play. And they did.”
Adding insult to injury, it’s not as if the power play that punished them three times was exactly firing on all cylinders. Coming into the tilt, the Maple Leafs’ man-advantage ranked among the worst in the league this season, and waded into Tuesday’s affair without its most potent threat, Auston Matthews.
And yet, by the end of the night, Toronto’s power play group had almost doubled its goal total for the season.
“Our special teams — the numbers are the numbers, right?” Montgomery said. “The players that get the privilege of either being on the penalty kill or power play, along with us coaches, need to be better with our plan, and need to be better with our execution.”
The coach pointed to the team’s zone entries as their “biggest failure” on the special-teams front of late. Lindholm and Pastrnak disagreed, highlighting instead the missed chances to finish and the poor puck luck. That they leave Toronto not quite on the same page is perhaps apt, given the disconnected effort that played out on the sheet in this one.
Only a month into the campaign, there’s no panic in the veteran Bruins’ voices when they dissect a loss like Tuesday’s. But there’s no question something appears off-kilter for this iteration of the B’s, amid a season that’s seen them shut out three times in eight games and dropped 8-2 by the Hurricanes just a week ago. A weekend of progress seemed to right that ship some as Boston reeled off a couple of shutout wins of their own coming into this one. But Tuesday’s goose egg sends them back to the drawing board.
“We just try to get better every day,” said Pastrnak, who is navigating uncharted territory after getting benched for the entire third period of the Bruins’ previous outing. “Five-on-five was there today. We can definitely see the bright side. Obviously, we have a lot to learn — we’re a younger group, and the mistakes are there.
“We’ll go back to Boston, watch some video, and get better.”