Kalman: Bruins' Latest Lackluster Effort Leaves Them Watching, Hoping For Help
BOSTON (CBS) - All right everyone, viewing party at David Krejci's house.
That's what the Bruins were left to look forward to after they again let a lesser opponent deny them two points down the stretch and lost 2-1 to the Carolina Hurricanes in a shootout on Tuesday at TD Garden.
The one point allowed the Bruins to tie Philadelphia for the second wild card in the Eastern Conference and tie Detroit for third place in the Atlantic Division, but the Flyers have two games in hand and the Red Wings have one game in hand.
The Red Wings and Flyers play in Detroit on Wednesday before the Red Wings come to Boston for a showdown with the Bruins. And the Bruins are going to find out if they're better at putting a voodoo spell on their competition through at TV than they are at beating teams that having nothing left to play for in crucial games.
"You try to have a good attitude and really enjoy tomorrow," Krejci responded to a question about how the Bruins will regroup after their disappointing loss. "Tomorrow night just kind of sit by the TV, watch the game and see what happens. That's all we can do right now."
The Bruins have been reduced to couch potatoes. Of course, they lose either way Wednesday because someone's going to get two points. In a worst-case scenario, someone will get two points and someone will get one.
Regardless, the Bruins went into a game against a team that was mathematically eliminated on Saturday and didn't put up much of a fuss for the first two periods. They looked tight and overwhelmed by the moment. They overpassed and didn't drive the net. Sure Brad Marchand had a shot right in front of Cam Ward that was kept out by the goaltender early in the second period. And Zdeno Chara hit the crossbar late in the middle period. But for most of the first 40 minutes, the Bruins were racking up shot attempts without making Ward sweat. They're tape-to-tape passes were few and far between. There were few rebounds and the ones that came loose didn't get hacked at by Bruins sticks.
After scoring 10 goals in their 1-1-0 road trip to St. Louis and Chicago over the weekend, the Bruins thought they solved their offensive woes. As it turned out, they didn't. Coach Claude Julien's alias these days is Captain Positivity because he has no choice but to try to keep his team's morale up. He chalked up the drop off in scoring to that mystical hockey term "finish" (it was lacking) and everyone's favorite hockey rhyme "puck luck."
But there was more lacking than every coach's go-to explanations against the Hurricanes. The Bruins didn't score enough to support their tightened-up defense and even the coach had a little hiccup when he chose to leave his leading goal-scorer Brad Marchand holstered on the bench through five rounds of the shootout, which the Bruins lost 1-0. Julien refused to say anything other than "hindsight" when challenged about his shootout selections, but the numbers were in his favor. Marchand is 0-for-3 this season and defenseman Torey Krug, despite going 53 games without a goal, had scored on his only shootout attempt this season before missing against the Hurricanes.
Nonetheless, the Bruins had no business going beyond 60 minutes, let alone 65 minutes, against Carolina.
"I was kind of hoping it didn't come to that. I was hoping that we'd get there, so I wasn't even really thinking about it," Marchand said.
When the Bruins assemble to watch the Detroit-Philadelphia game they may as well take the time to find their most comfortable positions and partake in their favorite snacks and drinks because at this rate their going to have plenty of time to gather around and watch hockey for the next two months.
Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.
