It’s often difficult to keep things in perspective for any hockey team once the Stanley Cup playoffs get rolling.
On the one hand, the Bruins have already exceeded expectations by qualifying for the postseason ahead of any reasonable schedule and even managed to give their fans some hope by splitting the first two games on the road in Buffalo. On the other hand, the Bruins dropped a historically bad playoff game on home ice, looking unready to play in an epic bout of futility that has most forgetting all about their regular-season accomplishments.
The 6-1 loss to the Sabres in Game 4 on Sunday afternoon ranks as perhaps the worst home playoff loss in franchise history and was embarrassing for everybody involved.
As has been the case for the bulk of this series and most playoff series in this team’s recent past, the Bruins players struggled mightily just to break the puck out of their own zone.
By the time it was over, Jeremy Swayman had exited the game in the third period while screaming at his bench as he left the ice after allowing six goals behind the nonexistent defense, and the Bruins players were lustily booed off the ice in each of the three periods of play.
The level of Game 4’s stink bomb makes it nearly impossible for anybody to remember that simply making the playoffs was the big accomplishment, and it certainly has forced all of the best Bruins players to take a long look in the mirror.
“You’ve got to use both sides of it. You can’t sit with it going into next game because it’s not gonna do you any good,” said Charlie McAvoy, who finished a minus-4 and picked a really bad time to have one of the worst games of his NHL career. “But I think we can use it to light a fire at the same time. Man to man in here, if we’re not (bleeping) embarrassed with what just happened, then I don’t know what to say.”
McAvoy and Jonathan Aspirot were disastrous while on the ice for four of the six goals that ended up in the back of Boston’s net, but everybody from rookie Fraser Minten to big-money veteran Elias Lindholm struggled to do anything.
The entire first period was a disaster, beginning to end, with the Bruins getting outshot 19-5 over the 20-minute span, and virtually no response from the players after Marco Sturm called a timeout when the Bruins fell behind by a three-goal deficit. Certainly, the Bruins head coach wasn’t above criticism either as his decisions to insert Lukas Reichel and Jordan Harris into the lineup backfired as well, with Harris turning a puck over that Zach Bensen eventually scored on to make it a 3-0 lead for the Sabres.
Sturm took accountability afterward and said he wasn’t quite sure how the Bruins came out flat in back-to-back home playoff games with a wasted chance to take control of the first-round series against the Sabres.
“I could feel it a little bit in Game 3 and definitely today,” said Marco Sturm, about the team not being ready to play a home playoff game. “If you’re a Boston Bruin and you’re playing at home [in the playoffs], you should be very excited, I think, going into a playoff game…I can’t explain it.
“It’s just very disappointing. In all areas we were behind, and if you’re not emotionally ready for [a playoff game] it all goes back to this. We should be embarrassed because it was
