Things did not start well at all. Brandon Hagel ended up getting the opening goal within the first 11 seconds of the game after beating his defender clean on body position, and put the puck straight past Swayman for the Lightning to go up 1-0.<\/p>\n
Mercifully, the Bruins managed to take advantage of their foes being a bit off-kilter, and Alex Steeves got a centering feed from Michael Eyssimont to tie the game up! 1-1 Everybody.<\/p>\n
Then, Morgan Geekie tipped in a goal that seemingly got by everybody, including the commentators on ESPN. 2-1 Bruins!<\/p>\n
Then, Viktor Arvidsson decided that he wanted to get in on that, and got a tip-in of his own! 3-1 Bruins!<\/p>\n
No further scoring, and we head to the 2nd period!<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the positives. To begin with, that Matthew Poitras kid is back! Let\u2019s see what he\u2019s got!<\/p>\n
Nice backhander, kid! 4-1 Bruins!<\/p>\n
Then, Morgan Geekie got a two-on-one with David Pastrnak, and hammered it home to make it 5-1 Bruins!<\/p>\n
Not too long after this, a significant amount of nonsense occured. There were mass scrums, there was a goalie fight after Jeremy Swayman decided he needed to take out Brandon Hagel\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026and there were penalties. Oh man, were there penalties.<\/p>\n
Those penalties came up big for the Lightning. Very big.<\/p>\n
First, Oliver Bjorkstrand got a rebound out of a net-front scramble\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026then Darren Raddysh put a missile on from the point\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026and then Nick Paul, who seems to be an eternal haunt of the Bruins, got a tip-in goal. Bringing the period to an end with a 5-4 Bruins lead.<\/p>\n
While there will be much discussion of the second period and the validity of the penalties called, the sad reality is that the Bruins had plenty of opportunity at even strength during this period to respond, and unfortunately the team that met the moment was the Lightning, and Nikita Kucherov in specific. No penalties, no man disadvantages, just a great pass and a good shot. 5-5 Everybody.<\/p>\n
Tampa got another power play in the middle of all this but let\u2019s be real, the Lightning had every shot.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s gonna come back to bite you.<\/p>\n
Jake Guentzel finally completed the steal by scoring on Jeremy Swayman in the Shootout.<\/p>\n
6-5, Bruins Lose the Stadium Series.<\/p>\n
Your TOI Leader was Charlie McAvoy, who logged 30:19 tonight.This was a winnable game that the Boston Bruins got suckered into giving away. The Bruins got up big thanks to good hard work and an early command of the unusual ice, which seemed to flummox the Lightning and seemingly caused Vasilevskiy to have trouble with tracking the puck. Things were looking really, really good, and then the Lightning started drawing some attention, and that attention turned into violence, which turned into a series of penalties that were either inexplicable to call or completely avoidable. Regardless of what you think of the Lightning, they are still full of extremely talented players, and those talented players made mincemeat of the B\u2019s 5-on-3 PK, which allowed them a chance to get back into this one, and for all the hemming and hawwing we\u2019ve done and will continue to do about those penalties, the game tying goal and the game-starting goal were even strength tallies made by forwards beating the backcheck in front of them fair and square and in extremely inconvenient times. OT wasn\u2019t much better, and while Swayman did what he could in the shootout, Jake Guentzel was just too much. Boston falls to 4-2-0 in Outdoor games.The refereeing in this game was, to put it nicely, complete and total buttcheeks. Granted, and given how unhappy we are right now I think we can admit some of the penalties that Boston got through the 2nd and 3rd period were genuine, reckless, and frankly idiotic to take, others were just bizarrely enforced or late whistled or just missed entirely. The Lightning went 3-for-8 tonight where Boston only went 1-for-3 on the power play, and Tampa was only short-handed during the 1st period. That should say everything.I will stop short at calling this game rigged or something like that. Boston made a hard pivot towards a more conservative, defensive shell game after the nightmarish 2nd period and allowed the Lightning to slowly find cracks in their defense; not exactly hard to do given the talent on display. They might\u2019ve been let back in after a major kerfuffle, but the refs are just bad at their jobs, and the Lightning are great at gaming bad refs. Sometimes this becomes enormously apparent like tonight. Right now, the Bruins aren\u2019t good enough to overcome that. The longer term goal is getting to the point where you can. B\u2019sJeremy Swayman faced almost 45 shots tonight; a vast majority of which happened in the second half of the second period. That\u2019s as much an indictment on the defense in front of him as it is the fact he had a truncated version of that defense in front of him for most of the 2nd period. That .891 SV% does not even begin to tell the whole story; he made some heroic saves to keep this team in a truly frustratingly wonky game. He also fought Andrei Vasilevskiy tonight, which I\u2019m sure he enjoyed. Maybe if you wanna goalie fight you should have a couple of practice rounds in your pads at Warrior. Just to get the form.I had to watch the NHL in ASL broadcast and I highly recommend it; the ESPN broadcast was miserable as it usually is, and the ASL broadcast by comparison was nothing but crowd noise, basic information, and only occasionally some missed shots but that was a function of the main camera. I can\u2019t vouch for the ASL commentators\u2019 performance, but they both seemed pretty engaged with what was going on and updated the viewer frequently.Tonight, the Bruins lost. They played out on dogs#!t ice, got up big, lost it all thanks to bad penalties and even worse refereeing, and still pulled a point off of the division leaders and are rapidly coming for Colorado\u2019s hide in the race for the President\u2019s Trophy. Last time, the B\u2019s were the ones to come back and nearly make it an extra time game. They now know they can at least hang, at least for a little bit. Now they have to start thinking about whether or not they can survive a playoff series against this team; because if things hold as they are, the Bruins will face the Lightning again in April; both in the regular season and playoffs. Plenty of decisions to be made; pre-Olympic deadline is almost here, and the post-Olympic deadline isn\u2019t that far off afterwards. Much to consider here, and let\u2019s hope Don Sweeney is ready to make the best decision for the long-term health of this squad.Still just two points at the beginning of February. The game was dramatic and stupid but you gotta get on the bus to Sunrise anyway.<\/p>\n
The Bruins have their final game before the Olympic break on Wednesday, when they take on the Florida Panthers. That game drops the puck at 7pm EST. It\u2019s a TNT\/HBO game, so adjust your watching accordingly.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll see you there. Go B\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Things did not start well at all. Brandon Hagel ended up getting the opening goal within the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5099],"tags":[154,95,5132,530,34198,5,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-441230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-bruins","8":"tag-boston","9":"tag-boston-bruins","10":"tag-bostonbruins","11":"tag-bruins","12":"tag-bruins-gameday","13":"tag-hockey","14":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116000422871386320","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}