Say what you will about the 2010-11 Boston Bruins, but consistency is something on which they have been able to pride themselves.
Have they gotten steady scoring from all of their offensive weapons night in and night out? Certainly not. Has it been safe to say what their lineup will be on any given night over the past month? Nope. Still, there are things that can be assumed with this Bruins team that generally haven’t been missing in large chunks. The Bruins have been a team that has used physicality to its advantage, has received unimaginably good goaltending, and, above all, hasn’t been prone to losing streaks.
It’s safe to say the Bruins have not been themselves of late.
The B's failed to render the Leafs scorers ineffective Tuesday, as both Phil Kessel and Mikhail Grabovski scored two goals in a 4-3 Toronto win. Grabovski’s body had a bit of a hellish night, as he took some hard hits from Zdeno Chara (one of which left him down on the ice in the first period), but it was the same old story on the score sheet. Coming off back-to-back losses against the Red Wings, the Bruins dropped their third straight game in regulation for the first time all season.
The roster got some new blood following the game thanks to a trade for Senators center Chris Kelly, but the No. 1 story with this team is that it has been exposed of late, and not just by good teams.
The fact that the Red Wings were able to have their way with the B’s over the weekend shouldn’t have been baffling, as they boast a roster of highly skilled finesse players who, if given chances, can capitalize without looking back. When the lowly Maple Leafs, who traded one of their top forwards a day earlier and entered the night with the fifth-worst record in hockey, does the same, it’s a bit more surprising.
“Unacceptable,” Claude Julien said following the game. “I think it’s one of those situations where if you have any sense of pride, you’re embarrassed about tonight, not because the other team played well, but because we did not play to the level that we should be playing.”
The level to which the team should be playing isn’t exactly a mystery. It’s the level the B's played to from Dec. 23 to Feb. 9, a 22-game stretch that had bookend fight nights, and one in which the team went 14-5-3.
Yet since that win over the Canadiens that featured everything a fan could want — fighting, scoring and more fighting — the B’s have failed to pick up a win.
“We haven’t played up to the capability that, as a team I think we obviously expect a lot more of ourselves. I think Detroit exposed us a little bit in the last two games,” said Gregory Campbell, who had his third multi-point game of the season. “We were counting on this game to be a good bounceback game, and I think we have to look at ourselves, look at our game.”
When some guys look at the game they see more puck-watching and less cases of players taking the body. Tim Thomas saw it Tuesday. Daniel Paille, who has the perspective of being able to see the recent Bruins funk from both the press box (Friday and Sunday) and the ice (Tuesday), saw the same thing, and it isn’t something that’s been characteristic of this team.
“I think we just need to focus, look at the game, look at the mistakes we’ve been making. Not just today, but over the past few games,” Paille said. “We’re making those mistakes that we don’t need to. Probably, should take the body a little bit more and we’re not. I think we are just puck-watching a little bit, and we've got to start playing aggressively and attacking as much as we can.”
The Bruins now embark upon a six-game road trip in which they’ll face the Islanders, Senators (twice), Flames, Canucks and Oilers. Of the five teams they will see on the trip, they will face only two playoff teams in the Canucks (first in the Western Conference) and Flames (eighth in the Western Conference). If there’s anything that Tuesday night could have taught the Bruins, it was that they can be beatable to any team when they aren’t playing their style of hockey. It’s now up to them to not give lesser teams the opportunity to do what the Leafs did to them.
“There’s a reason we haden’t lost three in a row [before],” Mark Recchi said after the game. “We take pride in making sure we don’t get on big streaks, losing streaks, and we’re going to do the same thing. It’s going to be tough going to Long Island there, they’ve had some good games lately. We’re playing three teams this week that are really loosey-goosey, and just go play and not worry about it. We’re playing for something and we’ve got to get ready.”
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