Boston Bruins: Staying Focused While At Home
The Boston Bruins have had struggles with games on home ice. The Bruins are 2-5-1 on home ice. At 8-7-1, the Bruins are currently on pace for an 87 point season. That’s nowhere close enough to getting a spot in the playoffs this season. Even with tonight’s strong 3-1 win over the Detroit Red Wings, the Bruins aren’t as mentally tough as they used to be.
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There are reasons why. The Bruins have had a lot of turnover, and this Bruins squad is taking longer than we expected to click. The Bruins are now without one of their strongest voices in the locker room. Chris Kelly is gone for the season, and his voice is missed by the team (and his presence is actually being missed by the fans). Finally, the Bruins are forgetting how to play sixty minute hockey. They drop the hammer in the first period, only to have it land on their feet later in the game.
Claude Julien expressed his disappointment in the lack of consistency by the Black and Gold after Saturday’s optional skate. Previous Bruins teams would eat adversity for breakfast. This year’s squad seems to crumble when presented with challenges, and the Bruins bench boss needed to tackle this problem head-on. (Thankfully, the Bruins overcame a few third period mistakes and a late Adam McQuaid penalty to reverse that trend tonight.)
“You have to address it. I think that’s the number one criteria right now of our issue but…I can’t be in each and every players head. It’s up to them to take the responsibility to focus for longer than what we have been focused in some of these games,” said Julien. “It’s about, you know, being prepared to put in 60 minutes of hockey. When you dissect it, you know, you’re talking about 24 minutes to even 10 minutes of hockey, so that’s not that hard to do.
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“I think that’s what we have to realize here, that there’s a certain way that we play. When we play that way we’re successful, when we don’t we’re not. So they just have to, I guess, embrace the idea of that and do it properly for the amount of time that they play. If we do that we’re going to improve as a team.”
Accountability. The Bruins coaching staff are hammering that point home now. With a fifth of the season already in the books, and Thanksgiving fast approaching, the Bruins find themselves as a .500 team. It took tonight’s win to get the Black and Gold past the Buffalo Sabres in the standings.
The Bruins are now making it a point to hold themselves accountable. Their focus in tonight’s game seemed to go from shift-to-shift. It’s certainly a move in the right direction, and the B’s will need to keep at it if they want to get out of this Jekyll and Hyde style of hockey.
“It really comes to down to being accountable, and every individual needs to be focused on the task before [the game], during and then all the way to the end,” said B’s captain Zdeno Chara Saturday morning. “We can all hit, we can skate and we can score. We just need to be paying attention to the details.
“We need to make sure we maintain the pace we start the games with, and that we don’t crack. We need to make sure we stay patient and focused on every little detail, and make sure the other team cracks before we do.”
The Bruins showed that attention to detail in the 3-1 win. It’s great to see the team taking that step in the right direction tonight, and hopefully they will stay on this path.