Tuesday turned into just an all-around bad day for the Bruins. It started with Craig Smith and Brad Marchand entering COVID protocol -- Smith before morning skate, Marchand after -- and ended with a 4-1 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights at TD Garden.
It would be pretty easy to draw a straight line connecting the two. Not only did the Bruins have to face a surging Vegas team without two top-six forwards, including their best player, but they also had to deal with the disappointment of running into COVID issues again. League-wide, this season is starting to look reminiscent of last year in terms of the number of cases (two dozen just in the last two days) and multiple teams having games postponed.
After Tuesday’s loss, Taylor Hall acknowledged that it’s “disheartening” to see these problems returning in force.
“Yeah, it is. I mean, we all took the shots, and we’re in the same situation again. So it is disheartening,” Hall said. “We’re on the road and we’re trying to do the right things away from hockey. It is what it is. That’s the world we live in right now. At some point, hopefully this spring is the last time we have to deal with this stuff. But it is disheartening. I think you’re seeing it in football, you’re seeing it in basketball, you’re seeing it all over the place. I know Smitty and Marchy, they’re feeling fine. They could be playing the game. So we’ll just deal with it. Every team has to go through it at some point.”
That said, Hall refused to use COVID as an excuse for the Bruins’ poor performance Tuesday night, noting that the team played pretty well without Marchand during his recent three-game suspension. He also shot down the idea that the Bruins’ recent travel caught up to them, pointing out that the Golden Knights traveled to Boston from the same time zone with one less day of rest.
“No. I mean, we played three games with Marchy out, and I thought we played well,” Hall said. “We did our best in his absence. Everyone knows what he does for our team, and I thought we did a good job making up for that when he was out with his suspension. Today, I can’t really buy into the excuses -- the travel or the COVID stuff. Every team deals with it. It is what it is. We have to respond and have to get better.”
While the Bruins were able to play Tuesday night, they are not necessarily out of the woods. Other teams have seen cases pile up over multiple days, including the Calgary Flames -- whom the Bruins just played on Saturday and who added three more players to protocol on Tuesday to bring their total to nine. The Flames have had three games postponed so far. Tuesday night’s Minnesota-Carolina game was also postponed due to the Hurricanes’ outbreak.
More cases for the Bruins on Wednesday could mean postponements of their own. They are scheduled to play the Islanders in New York on Thursday before then traveling to Canada for games in Montreal and Ottawa on Saturday and Sunday. Coach Bruce Cassidy said they are keeping their fingers crossed as they await their next round of test results.
“We had a little bit of a scare [Monday]. [Tuesday] it’s real,” Cassidy said. “A couple other ones were close, so it was an interesting day in that regard. Let’s hope that’s the end of it. We’ve lost two key players. We’ve been fortunate enough up until now, we hadn’t lost anybody. Now you’ve got two. Who knows tomorrow? You’ve seen different teams string two or three days together. So we’ve got our fingers crossed and hope that nothing comes back tonight from today’s testing, and we can just kind of forge ahead with the players we have and just be better on Thursday, which I think we will.”