Boston Bruins
“There’s really no excuse for it, to be honest with you.”
Marco Sturm and the Bruins are 11-14-5 away from TD Garden this season. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Don Sweeney and the Bruins’ top brass saw it fit to avoid another sell-off last Friday ahead of the NHL’s trade deadline.
After all, a Bruins roster that has exceeded expectations all season still sat in a playoff spot by the time the deadline came and went.
Even if Sweeney wasn’t going to cough up future assets in search of rentals, he was adamant about letting this current crop of players see this season through in hopes of punching their ticket back to the postseason.
Still, Boston’s GM was candid when asked on Friday about the most concerning trend plaguing this upstart roster.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a team that wants to have playoff success that’s not able to go out and win on the road,” Sweeney said on Friday. “So that’s an area we definitely have to be better at. … And there’s really no excuse for it, to be honest with you. I mean, to be a dominant team at home as we have, you should really be able to go into any environment and execute.”
Of Boston’s final 21 regular-season games after Friday’s trade deadline, 12 of them are away from the friendly confines of TD Garden. That’s not good news for a Bruins club that entered the deadline with an 11-14-4 record on the road.
That record dipped to 11-14-5 on Sunday after Boston’s latest setback against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
A point gained in the standings is still valuable in a compacted Eastern Conference playoff race. But, there were few silver linings to be drawn out of Boston’s 5-4 overtime loss to Pittsburgh at PPG Paints Arena.
“We have to find a way to win these games,” Pavel Zacha — whose second hat trick of the season went for naught in the loss — said postgame. “I’m glad we got a point, but at this part of the season, it would be great to have 2 points.”
For the first 33 minutes of Sunday’s game, it looked as though Boston was finally ready to get off the schneid in road contests.
A pair of goals from Zacha ensured that Marco Sturm’s team wasn’t going to be chasing another game. A misplay by Pens goalie Artūrs Šilovs allowed David Pastrnak to score his first goal in nine games, giving Boston a 3-0 cushion.
But, Boston’s hopes of turning a back-to-back weekend slate into four points (after Saturday’s home win over the Capitals) dissipated in short order.
For the remainder of Sunday’s game, the Penguins — playing without both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin — outscored Boston, 5-1.
A pair of penalties from Jonathan Aspirot and Hampus Lindholm gave Pittsburgh an extended 5-on-3 advantage that ended with an Egor Chinakhov goal in the second period.
Brutal misplays with the puck and questionable decision-making from Aspirot and Charlie McAvoy loomed large in the third period and overtime, while timely saves from Joonas Korpisalo (.851 save percentage the last two games) were few and far between in crunch time.
Even with Zacha lighting the lamp for a third time with 11:26 to go in regulation, it wasn’t enough to hold off the Pens, who tied the game up again at 4-4 less than three minutes later off a second-chance effort from Anthony Mantha.
The Bruins were right to be peeved by a missed interference call from Erik Karlsson against Pastrnak in overtime, which led to Tommy Novak’s game-winner just seconds later. But Boston doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on after a game where they let a three-goal advantage give way to just one point in the standings.
The Bruins aren’t making life any easier on themselves when it comes to solidifying a playoff spot in the East.
As of Monday night, the Bruins remain in the second wild-card spot in the East with a record of 35-22-6 (76 points). But, the Blue Jackets sit right behind Boston in the standings with 74 points — and the road isn’t getting any easier for Sturm’s team.
Boston is in the midst of a 12-game winning streak at TD Garden, but that home cooking has been undercut by a seven-game losing skid on the road.
Of those 11 final road games this season, five are against teams currently in the playoff picture, with another two scheduled against the Blue Jackets (March 29, April 12) at Nationwide Arena.
The Bruins — as of now — still control their own fate this season. But, that could change if this team doesn’t start taking care of business in enemy territory over the next six weeks.
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
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