Bruins losing ground in NHL’s Itidarod

It’s tough sledding, and it’s not just the Boston Bruins.

A quick visit with New York Islanders GM Lou Lamoriello in the hallway during intermission of last night’s 5-4 overtime win over the Bruins, where I catch him alone and politely ask how the heck his team has that record (14-18-7 at the time) when the hockey on the ice looked like the 2021 Eastern Conference Final version out there against the Bruins.

Lamoriello indulged my observation that Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock continue to be solid cogs in their machine but noted that injuries have factored and trying to find reason to the season has not been easy. He agrees that the National Hockey League has several puzzling teams right now.

Just as the Bruins had hit the wall playing three games in four days on the road, so did the Tampa Bay Lightning, albeit out west, taking no points out of six available. While the Lightning have a boatload of games in hand, failing to make anything out of the three just played casts doubt as to whether the Bolts project back into Stanley Cup contention as it so looked upon their domination of the defending champion Florida Panthers in the back half of the rivals’ recent home-and-home.

It’s a long way to 82GP, and this is the part where Rocky gets punched in the face at super-slo-mo with underwater sound effects.

Goals are hard to come by for the Bruins, and when they play a desperate, five-man attack, they become vulnerable to counterattack. Sometimes, it’s just this odd slump in the powerplay and/or penalty kill that’s undermining solid, 5-on-5 efforts.

Either way, the Bruins have to start defending in the same games they score or this season will get away from them.

Then there is this: The Montreal Canadiens have three games in hand on the Bruins going into tonight’s game on home ice against Vancouver. It cannot happen in this order, but by pure arithmetic, should the Habs win all three, they will have caught the Bruins.

After an initial surge under Interim Coach Joe Sacco, the Bruins are now 4-4-2 in their last 10 with games coming up against the Edmonton Oilers (Tuesday night at home), a home-and-home with the Lightning and a game at Florida.

It’s an opportunity to maximize the significance of a turnaround, but beyond David Pastrnak’s suddenly hot stick, what else is compelling about this hockey team right now?

More punches in the face in super slow motion, accompanied by underwater sound effects. It’s the seventh round of a 12-round slugfest.

They’re all trying very hard to win, but the Bruins and the NHL for that matter are in a strange place where every 10 minutes of hockey give pause as to what we are witnessing.

Is this what it looks like when the retirements of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci catch up with a hockey team that leaned upon their shoulders for so very long? Will we find out after the season why Charlie Coyle has not been the same player he was in 2023-24? Would a return of Hampus Lindholm ease the game for Charlie McAvoy?

Is it possible that the Bruins aren’t that good and that Don Sweeney could have authored the same basic memo that Chris Drury issued when the Rangers were 12-7-1?

It made sense in this space that the addition of Elias Lindholm would only fortify a team that managed to contend for the Presidents Trophy without him last season. Elias went minus-4 against the Islanders; so much for the reunion of Pastrnak, Lindholm and Brad Marchand.

During this wall-hitting stretch, no matter what is going well for the Bruins is more than mitigated by what is not going well.

The payments are coming due, and this is what losing looks like. Balance, consistency, timely contributions, it’s all fleeting.

Or is this just another ebb before the flow in a season full of them for many teams?

Bruins management needs to decide what’s going on here and act accordingly.

Has every circumstance run its course? Does the management team know all it’s going to know before the March 5 trade deadline? Can the Bruins afford to wait that long to take a swing at righting their ship?

More questions than answers for sure, but that’s the nature of a season that reminds me of 2009-10, the year after the Bruins traded Phil Kessel. The 39-30-13 Bruins made the playoffs and eliminated Buffalo in six before falling to Philadelphia in that strange series that saw Boston go out to a 3-0 series lead only to lose David Krejci (on the Mike Richards hit) and watch Miro Satan’s team-leading offense dry up in an instant.

In fact, when Richards caught Krejci in the middle catching up to a slow pass from Zdeno Chara and deconstructed the Bruins center’s wrist, the puck popped loose to Milan Lucic, who hit Satan for the primary assist on what would be Satan’s final goal and point as a Bruin. He had led the team in playoff points to that point.

Meantime, Marchand was skating with the Black Aces and, one day after they skated in Philly, came off the ice joking with backup goalie Tim Thomas about a save Thomas had made on Marchand during their practice. It was nice to see two guys having fun after being told they would not be playing for the NHL team during the playoff run.

Thomas, we’d later find out, needed a hip surgery the day after the breakup meeting. He would back up Tuukka Rask in the 2010-11 opener in Prague, a loss that caused coach Claude Julien to mix things up for the second game of the season-opening series with the Coyotes. Thomas took the ball and never looked back en route to his second Vezina Trophy and the Conn Smythe.

Marchand, a rookie who had made the 2009-10 team out of camp but was demoted to the AHL after a disastrous opening quarter, might have been Boston’s solution for that fateful Flyers series. But the Bruins chose to keep him out of it; you can’t argue with the career result.

Here’s the thing about the 2009-10 Bruins: Their goals-for total of 206 was lowest in the NHL, but their goals-against of 200 was second in the league. The 2024-25 Bruins should be similar but are not stacking up: Their 2.64 goals-for average is predictably pedestrian, but their 3.11 GAA is something out of the 1970s. The number is obviously skewed by some bizarre blowouts, and the mean is probably only somewhat a false sense of security.

At some point, there has to be a reason for the lopsided losses, especially now that the Bruins have lost control of a few games since the coaching change.

Is it as simple as an offensively challenged team trying to do too much leaves itself open or loses its necessary structure? Hard to say because, as noted above, during this winless streak the Bruins are failing to outscore their mistakes, no matter how many goals are scored in the game altogether.

The torch-bearing mob has assembled, but I’m not convinced the Bruins should be sellers. The season is barely at the halfway point so much more could happen, but history does not forgive Bruins playoff misses and this season is trending in the wrong direction.

Again, as stated in a prior column, Don Sweeney will always do what he believes is best for the Bruins organization. He will never manage for his job. That noted, unless team president Cam Neely believes so strongly in Sweeney that he would entrust him with another roster reinvention, remember that Peter Chiarelli was fired four years after becoming the only Bruins GM since Milt Schmidt to win the Stanley Cup and one year after winning the 2013-14 Presidents Trophy.

Meantime, much hockey left to play, and amidst more meandering Bruins management will be left to deliberate if the franchise can afford to let it play out without a second intervention.

Former first-round draft pick Dwight Foster has passed away at age 67. Foster broke into the NHL as a member of the famed late ’70s Lunch Pail Bruins.

Symptom of a balanced schedule: Even a generationally removed Boston fanbase you would think would have the backstory knowledge to chant “ROO-AHH” with his highness on the Islanders bench on Sunday, especially upon losing that coach’s challenge. But Patrick Roy, on the short list of any Bruins fan’s hate list from the last decade of the old Garden, was able to coach through the game as if he’d been some anonymous newcomer fresh up from the minors.

Finally, RIP Dwight Foster, who centered the Bruins’ fourth line during the final season of Don Cherry’s tenure as Bruins coach (1978-79). The former first-rounder (1977) was quickly affected by a rookie-season knee injury and didn’t really gain NHL traction until the team’s Lunch Pail core was aging out. With Steve Kasper hitting the ground running in the first half of the otherwise-tumultuous 1980-81 season, Foster was traded that winter for utility forward Mike Gillis. He would return to the Bruins during the 1985-86 season and play for them in 86-87, much as Ted Donato returned to the team in 2003-04 after five years away.

Hard to believe that the great Jean Ratelle, at age 84, is the last surviving member of the center depth chart of the 1978-79 Bruins, who have now lost Peter McNab, Bobby Miller and Dwight Foster.

Hockey has also lost Al MacNeil, whose role in the Montreal Canadiens’ shocking, seven-game upset of the 1970-71 Bruins was overshadowed by a lanky rookie in net named Ken Dryden. MacNeil, a midseason replacement for Claude Ruel, outcoached Hall of Fame Canadiens defenseman Tom Johnson, who had played out the string in Boston and took over the Bruins bench after Harry Sinden left hockey for two years, reportedly dissatisfied with Boston’s offer after coaching the Bruins to the top in 1970.

Johnson pretty much let the inmates run the asylum, and the B’s allowed the Habs an average of 4 goals a game for the series. Johnson stayed behind the Bruins bench in 1971-72, and the Bruins, tweaked with the addition of Carol Vadnais on D, split the nets between Ed Johnston and Gerry Cheevers, allowed less than 2 GAA, and won the Cup for the second time in three seasons.