Picking up the pieces after Bruins' stunning collapse
The Bruins had arguably the greatest regular season in NHL history. Their 65 wins and 135 points are records that could stand for a long time.
After Sunday, it all seems pretty meaningless. The debates around this Bruins team won’t be about historic greatness. They will be about historic collapses, historic upsets and historic disappointments.
After all that regular-season winning, the Bruins failed to get out of the first round. They blew a 3-1 series lead and lost in seven games to a Florida Panthers team that had 43 fewer points than them in the regular season.
They let a pair of third-period leads slip away in Game 6. They let another slip away in Game 7, surrendering the tying goal with 59 seconds left in regulation before losing in overtime, 4-3.
How on earth did this happen? Obviously, there’s a lot that goes into such a stunning reversal of fortunes, so let’s take a look at some of the biggest factors.
Injuries
This is the one that obviously sounds most like an excuse. Everyone’s banged up this time of year and every team deals with injuries. Nonetheless, it’s a part of the equation that has to be considered here.
Captain Patrice Bergeron missed the first four games of the series with what we now know was a herniated disc in his back. Fellow veteran center David Krejci missed three games with an unspecified upper-body injury.
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The Bruins actually won the two games in which they had neither Bergeron nor Krejci. They went 0-3 in the three games Bergeron played, and lost the final two games with Bergeron and Krejci both in the lineup.
It’s a stretch to say the Bruins were better off without Bergeron and/or Krejci, but it’s also fair to suggest that they weren’t themselves in this series, and that perhaps the Bruins would still be playing if they were.
Some of Bergeron’s numbers in his three games look normal. He won 70.3% of his faceoffs, played 19:30 per game, and had a team-best 63.9% Corsi. Others do not. The Bruins got outscored 4-0 during his 5-on-5 shifts, and he had just one point.
Krejci stepped up in Game 7, recording a goal and two assists and helping the Bruins outshoot the Panthers 9-1 when the Czech line was on the ice. In his other three games, though, Krejci had one point and the Bruins got outshot 36-19 during his shifts.
Injuries affected the Bruins late in the regular season, too, with Taylor Hall, Nick Foligno and Derek Forbort all missing significant time, and Krejci missing the final six games as well. As a result, the Bruins never really got a chance to figure out what their best lineup would be for the playoffs, which brings us to…
Too much lineup shuffling
As we just covered, some of this was the result of injuries. The injuries to Hall, Foligno and Forbort over the final month and a half of the regular season, not to mention load management for veterans like Bergeron, necessitated a certain amount of juggling. So did those players’ returns for the playoffs and Bergeron and Krejci’s absences for part of the series.
But some of the shuffling was unnecessary. When Bergeron returned for Game 5, Jim Montgomery started the game with him and Brad Marchand split up, marking the first time in seven years those two started a game in which they both played on different lines. Montgomery said Sunday night that was one move he’d like to have back.
“I think the only thing I can look at right now and say I would have done different is starting Game 5, I would have had Bergeron and Marchand together,” Montgomery said. “It took me eight minutes to get to there. Don’t know if it makes a difference, but you know, that’s the only thing that I look at right now that I would change. I don’t have very much regret with anything that we did.”
Perhaps there should be a couple other regrets, though. Benching Matt Grzelcyk for Game 6 so he could reunite a Derek Forbort-Connor Clifton third pairing that had already struggled in Games 1 and 2 was a curious decision, and one that did not work out. Clifton committed two turnovers that led directly to Panthers goals, and Clifton and Forbort both got caught below the goal line on another.
Late in Game 6 and carrying into Game 7, Montgomery dropped Jake DeBrusk from his usual spot next to Bergeron and Marchand to the third line with Charlie Coyle and Taylor Hall. Tyler Bertuzzi filled the right-wing spot on Bergeron’s line. While Bertuzzi did score a power-play goal, both new-look lines had a quiet Game 7 at 5-on-5.
Montgomery was oddly reluctant to even test a Hall-Coyle-Bertuzzi third line late in the regular season when Hall returned from injury, and then he quickly abandoned that combination in Game 6, the first time he tried it in game action. Maybe it would have at least had a shot at working with more time together, and then Montgomery wouldn’t have had to break up the Marchand-Bergeron-DeBrusk line as a byproduct.
Either way, the combination of players going in and out of the lineup due to injury and Montgomery constantly tinkering certainly could have contributed to the Bruins looking disjointed in this series.
Goaltending
The Bruins led the NHL with a .929 save percentage in the regular season, 14 points better than any other team. In this series, they were way down at .885.
Yes, the Bruins committed far too many turnovers in front of their goalie (more on that in a minute), but their goaltending also simply wasn’t good enough.
It is fair to question the Bruins’ management of their goalie situation and whether that contributed. For the last four months of the regular season, Montgomery and goalie coach Bob Essensa pretty much stuck to a strict rotation of Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman.
They abandoned it in the playoffs in favor of riding Ullmark for the first six games, treating him like a true workhorse and giving him multiple chances to bounce back from rough outings despite the fact that he was dealing with some sort of nagging injury.
Whether it was physical, mental or both, Ullmark wore down as the series went on. He gave up 10 goals in a pair of losses in Games 5 and 6. Montgomery and Essensa finally turned to Swayman in Game 7, a tough spot to be giving a goalie his first start of the series. Swayman gave up four goals on 31 shots. The first, a backhander that beat him five-hole, was the most stoppable. You wonder if perhaps that was some rust surfacing that might not have been there had he played earlier in the series.
Goaltending, more than anything else, was the Bruins’ biggest advantage over the rest of the NHL in the regular season. Ullmark and Swayman were a historically great tandem. In this series, the Bruins lost the goaltending battle to a team that ranked 18th in save percentage in the regular season and that made a goalie change of its own midway through the series.
You have to wonder if sticking with the rotation that worked so well in the regular season would have produced a different first-round result, no matter how much it would have bucked convention. It at least looks like the Bruins stuck with Ullmark too long before giving Swayman a shot.
Turnovers
The Bruins just could not stop turning the puck over, especially in the final three games. Bertuzzi’s backhand pass right to a Panther in his own slot in Game 5. Ullmark’s turnover behind his own net in overtime in that game. Clifton’s two missed passes on the breakout that led to Panthers goals in Game 6.
In Game 7, the Panthers’ second goal came after a pair of failed zone clearances from Garnet Hathaway and Hampus Lindholm. Their overtime winner saw Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett win a 2-on-3 battle down low against Brandon Carlo, Grzelcyk and Bergeron. Boston committed 18 giveaways in the game, doubling up Florida.
The Bruins had no answer for Tkachuk and Bennett and their relentless forechecking all series. In the 78 minutes that those two were on the ice at 5-on-5, the Panthers outscored the Bruins 5-2, had 59.9% of shot attempts, 66.2% of expected goals and 70% of high-danger chances.
“I thought that that Bennett line was pretty dominant. Tkachuk’s an outstanding hockey player and we didn’t contain him,” Montgomery said after Game 7. “I thought, they always changed the momentum back to them every time they were on the ice pretty much. If I’m looking at the series, that was the biggest difference pretty much.”
The Panthers were one of the NHL’s best teams at creating offense off the forecheck all season. Asked if the Bruins’ inability to combat that was a matter of personnel, execution or something else, Montgomery did not have an answer at hand.
“To give you a real intelligent answer about that right now, I just, I can’t pontificate about it,” he said. “I felt we had the right personnel, and I have to take some responsibility for not being able to get us to play north quicker. So if I can answer that right now, I would say it lies on me.”
Fair. But also, too many of the Bruins’ defensive-zone turnovers were unforced errors, with hardly any pressure on the puck carrier. Those fall squarely on the players on the ice.