When the Boston Bruins are hot, they’re one of the hottest teams in the NHL. When the Bruins aren’t, they drop games to the worst teams in the league.
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The Boston Bruins are capable of playing fantastic hockey against some of the best teams in the league. Unfortunately, the B’s are also capable of tanking against some of the worst. The Bruins 4-2 loss to the Colorado Avalanche is just another one of those Jekyll-and-Hyde games that leaves the fans frustrated and looking for answers.
The Boston Bruins loss started with their goaltender. With Tuukka Rask playing yesterday, the B’s chose to give Anton Khudobin a chance to improve his record. That didn’t happen.
Khudobin looked like a tired AHL goaltender tonight. The Colorado offense was haphazard at best at times, but he wasn’t able to stop the Avalanche’s first seriously good opportunities. By the end of the night, Khudobin had the fans growling and the front office checking the bargain bin for backup goaltenders.
“There were a lot of problematic things tonight. No doubt that the power play could’ve helped us in the first period and it failed to do that. We needed some saves tonight & we didn’t get ‘em. A lot of things here we can be better at.” – Claude Julien on the Bruins ugly 4-2 home loss to the Avalanche.
Khudobin let in four goals on 22 shots. He ended up with a .818 save percentage for the night. That’s not NHL bad or even AHL bad. That’s Malcolm Subban facing the St. Louis Blues bad. Khudobin is now 1-4-0 on the season, and the biggest reason for the B’s defeat was his sloppy play in the crease.
It wasn’t just Khudobin who failed tonight (although he was the biggest contributor in the loss). The Krejci line was a mess, with David Krejci having an unusually rough -3 rating for the night.
One can make the excuse that the Bruins usually don’t do well on the bottom half of back-to-back games. Still, the Bruins know what is expected of them, and to have so many defensive breakdowns occur with one of the worst teams in the league is unacceptable.
“You want to have a good start,” said Zdeno Chara. “You don’t want to fall behind right away early in the game. At that point, you have to really chase and you put a lot more pressure on your team to be behind.
“That’s something that we need to do better, especially back-to-back games.”
One of the few bright spots of the game for the Black and Gold was forward David Pastrnak. The 20-year old winger put in two more goals tonight. He’s now at 18 this season, and is currently tied with Sidney Crosby for the most goals so far. Pastrnak is doing all he can to help the B’s get points, but at times it is looking like only half the team is trying to win.
It was one of those games where there were very little positives. Thankfully, the Bruins still have dozens of games to go. They’ll just have to put this one in the rear-view mirror and move on to the next game.
“There was a lot of problematic things there,” said Julien at the end of the press conference. “But at the same time, you’ve got to move on here. To me, it’s one of those nights that had we been smarter from the get-go, we would have had a chance.
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“Now we got to move forward here and start getting ready for Toronto.”