This was supposed to be an opportunity for the Bruins to awaken the ghosts of springs past and haunt the Maple Leafs as they returned to Boston for the first time since Oct. 22, 2019.
While the two teams entered Tuesday’s game with identical records, the Bruins did so as the hottest team in the league, while the Leafs had been treading water with a .500 record over the last month and a half. The Leafs didn’t have a goalie, while the Bruins had one who prompted one Toronto columnist to preemptively fret over his “swagger.”
So much for all of that. The Bruins got a rude wakeup call Tuesday night, with the Maple Leafs burying them in a 6-1 hole before Boston clawed back enough to end up with a moderately more respectable 6-4 final.
Will what happened on Tuesday mean anything if these two teams end up meeting in the playoffs again? Only time will tell. But what it means in the present is that the Leafs aren’t ready to be pushovers, and the Bruins aren’t going to be able to show up and win just because they’ve been the hotter team.
This one went south pretty quickly, with the Leafs jumping out to a 3-1 lead in the first period. Connor Clifton, who had been playing well for a pretty lengthy stretch before this, had an especially tough period. He turned the puck over with an errant pass on Toronto’s first goal, then had a shot blocked that led to a breakaway goal on the third.
The Leafs’ speed gave the Bruins problems all night, including on the second goal when William Nylander blew right past Brandon Carlo. There were more turnovers, too. A bad pass from Craig Smith helped set up Toronto’s fourth goal. Even Hampus Lindholm -- so clean and smooth through his first two games as a Bruin -- committed his first big blunder, making a drop pass to no one that handed the Leafs a 2-on-0 (which, fortunately for him, they botched).
Swayman, who entered the night on an 11-1-1 run that understandably was beginning to strike fear into some in Toronto, didn’t have it either. He got caught out of position on the second goal, misplayed the puck a couple times, and couldn’t make the big save to bail out his team that he’s been able to make throughout this run. He gave up a career-high six goals and got pulled after the second period.
Frustration set in as well. Taylor Hall responded to a hit from behind (a penalty the refs definitely missed) with a foolish jab to the side of Ilya Lyubushkin’s head -- one that didn’t look to be particularly vicious, but that did knock Lyubushkin out of the game. Brad Marchand also took a 10-minute misconduct at the end of the second, which certainly affected a comeback attempt that actually wound up making things at least somewhat interesting.
“You have to take care of the puck. We didn't do enough of it early on,” Bruce Cassidy said. “Obviously we weren't prepared to play, so shared responsibility. That's our job as coaches, get them ready to play, and the players have to be ready to play, know the magnitude of the game.
“We've been going well lately, so a bit of a surprise there in that area that we weren't sharp early on. If all those things don't happen, you need your goaltender to bail you out then, and that didn't happen either. So give them credit for starting on time, and that's where the game got away from us. We chased it. Tough team to chase the game against.”
Cassidy said there will be some lineup changes for Thursday’s game against New Jersey. That’s not a panic move or an overreaction to one game. He had wanted to work in some different players -- Mike Reilly, Josh Brown and Marc McLaughlin come to mind -- at some point soon anyways, but said Tuesday’s disaster would “accelerate” the process.
Regardless of what the lineup looks like, the Bruins will obviously be aiming to make sure Tuesday is just a one-off dud. This was clearly a major departure from how well they had been playing during the 14-2-1 run they had been on.
“I mean, you hope it's a one-off,” Cassidy said. “We've been going pretty well, and the guys were trying to work their way back in the game, whereas early in the year, I think sometimes -- I don't know if we got feeling sorry for ourselves or doubted ourselves, but we're well beyond that in these types of games.
“I think we were working back to it. Obviously some guys got frustrated with some calls, so they took themselves out of the right mindset, so you have to work through that. But it's a loss, a home loss. They were clearly better than us -- a team we may see down the road, so it's disappointing in that regard, sobering. We'll go back to work [Wednesday], and let's see how we respond Thursday. But yeah, it's disappointing we weren't better.”
This doesn’t mean the Maple Leafs are a significantly better team than the Bruins. It doesn’t mean the Leafs are now set up to exorcise their postseason demons should these two teams meet in a series. It just means that the Bruins still have work to do, that the Leafs aren’t going to be easily blown away, and that we should probably all hit the pause button on assuming this year is going to play out the same way as previous years.