With two points to be had, the score at 2-2 after 40:00, the hometown team produced a bagel on home ice with zero shots for the final 20:00.
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The best little hockey team on Causeway Street nearly put the TD Garden faithful to sleep Saturday night,
a 3-2 OT loss to the Senators that featured a zero-sum, no-shot, no-spark, no-clue, good-golly-Miss-Molly third period by the Black-and-Gold centenarians.
Only sporadically in their 100 years doing hockey business — a milestone to be commemorated Dec. 1 with the ho-hum Habs in town — have the Bruins been so, shall we say, woefully
comme ci, comme ca (translation: like this, like that) in how they go about their skate-and-shoot business.
With 2 points to be had, the score at 2-2 after 40:00, the hometown team produced a bagel on home ice with zero shots for the final 20:00. That bit of stunning ignominy is something they hadn’t done since Dec. 21, 2006, when nursing home a 2-0 win over the Canucks.
Zero. Literally nothing to see here, folks.
Please, wait, hold my $18 beer while I have a moment. Actually, here, hold both of my $18 beers. What we are seeing right now is getting tough on the eyes and harder to wash down.
For those of us who’ve witnessed upward of two-thirds of Bruins hockey history — the good, the godly, the bad, the ugly — this win-one, lose-one model is taking on the feel of the early- and mid-’60s Boston brand. That was the pre-Bobby Orr, pre-Channel 38, pre-Jeremy Jacobs, pre-Jumbotron iteration.
They were not good times, including a franchise-record eight consecutive playoff DNQs, the last of those including Orr’s 1966-67 rookie season (reminder: even the sainted No. 4, then only 18 years old, couldn’t lift the deadweight on that roster).
Oh, those days were damned entertaining, absolutely, because of standard Original Six mayhem: big fights, bucket-of-blood donnybrooks, the ice sheet covered in abandoned sticks, gloves, and sweaters. Those days are gone for good — for reasons good, bad, and political — but the passion around the play had a way of making up for the mediocre, sometimes passionless play of bad Bruins teams.
We’re seeing far too much of the mediocre and passionless right now in 2024. It’s a disturbing retro look. The 20:00 bagel on Saturday felt like a defining moment.
The final word on the latest loss — their ninth in 16 outings (7-7-2) to date — belonged to coach Jim Montgomery:
“We just weren’t good enough.”
When asked how to explain what’s happening here, because, well, it ain’t exactly clear, Montgomery said he’d leave that for the media members gathered in the building’s third-floor press room to figure out.
Awesome. We media folk have all the answers, albeit with zero authority, less influence, and a collective annual cap hit that, let’s just say, would fit comfortably below the $2 million Morgan Geekie is collecting these days as the Black-and-Gold’s mothballed 13th forward.
Here’s one thing to try: end Charlie McAvoy’s role as the lone point man on the No. 1 power play unit. Right now. Today. Big Mac is a skilled, gifted defenseman, but that gift does not come with the big red bow cloned and spun from the fabric of a shooter’s gloves. He just won’t fire.
As of Sunday morning, following another PP “0-for” Saturday night, the Bruins power play ranked T30 with Washington, a paltry 12.5 percent success rate. Only the Blues (10.8 percent) were worse. The Bruins have cashed in on only 8 of 64 opportunities.
Perfect setup for an emphatic, no-you-don’t-in-our-building response by the Bruins. Take back the night. Nope. The lost opportunity got folded into a stretch of some 25 minutes in which the Bruins didn’t land a single shot.
Not to put the unit’s failure all on McAvoy, because he could have shot and still not scored, but … well, he did not shoot. Yet again. Failure to launch. At least twice, maybe three times, perhaps four, the puck came McAvoy’s way and he either gathered it in for a hold, or dished off, or was unable to control it. The point is, he consistently opted for the knife instead of the gun. Reminder: the guy holding the knife in a gunfight isn’t the one left standing when all the smoke clears.
If Montgomery is going to remain fixed on the 4F-1D PP approach for his No. 1 unit, then it’s time for Hampus Lindholm to try the role up top. He clearly does not have McAvoy’'s overall game heft, but right now, as opposed to last season, he is more prone to shoot and more prone to score. He already has three goals, matching his entire output of last season.
The Bruins have reached the point, with the season’s first quarter mark fast approaching, where Montgomery must conjure up a fix. If there is no fix, general manager Don Sweeney and president Cam Neely will be left to send him packing or answer for engineering a roster that looks pretty good on paper, but so far not so good when the puck drops to the ice.
A century-wide view of how that either/or scenario typically plays out would point to Montgomery taking the fall, be that fair or unfair. That’s just the hockey biz. But does anyone out there think the coach is telling McAvoy not to shoot, for his forwards not to suck it up and drive pucks to the net, for the majority of his 18 skaters to show up with their only jam left home, spread on their morning toast?
Yep, the Habs will be here Dec. 1, game No. 26 for the Bruins on this season’s schedule, faceoff just after 3 p.m. It will be exactly 100 years removed from the first time the two cities went skate toe to skate toe, facing off across town in the building known in 1924 as Boston Arena.
So much of the game has changed in those 100 years. Yet what has remained the Bruins trademark, their legacy, has been not so much winning (a mere six Cups, only once since 1972), but the pride and passion consistently found in the product.
Pride and passion have been the ingredients keeping the fans connected, believing, buying, what made the Gallery Gods in the old Garden bellow louder than steam-driven iron horses when they didn’t like the effort. How they would have blown their gaskets Saturday night.
