Oy.

1st Period

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.

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.

Then, Morgan Geekie tipped in a goal that seemingly got by everybody, including the commentators on ESPN. 2-1 Bruins!

Then, Viktor Arvidsson decided that he wanted to get in on that, and got a tip-in of his own! 3-1 Bruins!

No further scoring, and we head to the 2nd period!

2nd Period

Oh boy.

Let’s start with the positives. To begin with, that Matthew Poitras kid is back! Let’s see what he’s got!

Nice backhander, kid! 4-1 Bruins!

Then, Morgan Geekie got a two-on-one with David Pastrnak, and hammered it home to make it 5-1 Bruins!

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…

…and there were penalties. Oh man, were there penalties.

Those penalties came up big for the Lightning. Very big.

First, Oliver Bjorkstrand got a rebound out of a net-front scramble…

…then Darren Raddysh put a missile on from the point…

…and 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.

Third Period

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.

Onto overtime we go.

Overtime

Tampa got another power play in the middle of all this but let’s be real, the Lightning had every shot.

That’s gonna come back to bite you.

Shootout

Jake Guentzel finally completed the steal by scoring on Jeremy Swayman in the Shootout.

6-5, Bruins Lose the Stadium Series.

Game Notes

• 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’s 5-on-3 PK, which allowed them a chance to get back into this one, and for all the hemming and hawwing we’ve 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’t 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’ve 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’t good enough to overcome that. The longer term goal is getting to the point where you can. B’s
• Jeremy Swayman faced almost 45 shots tonight; a vast majority of which happened in the second half of the second period. That’s 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’m 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’t vouch for the ASL commentators’ 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’s hide in the race for the President’s Trophy. Last time, the B’s 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’t that far off afterwards. Much to consider here, and let’s 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.

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’s a TNT/HBO game, so adjust your watching accordingly.

We’ll see you there. Go B’s.