The Boston Bruins turned in a better effort Sunday night in Utah. David Pastrnak bounced back in a big way after getting benched and called out by coach Marco Sturm. Joonas Korpisalo was very good in net. And it still wasn’t enough.
The Bruins fell to the Mammoth, 3-2. They finished their Western road trip with an 0-3-0 record, and have now lost four straight overall.
This was another reminder of just how little margin for error these Bruins have, and just how little offense they have outside of Pastrnak.
The Bruins started well in this one, but fell behind 1-0 on a bit of a fortunate bounce on a Utah power-play goal. They fought back to take the lead, though, with Pastrnak leading the way one night after a subpar effort led Sturm to staple his star player to the bench for the final seven minutes of the game.
Pastrnak tied the game on the power play late in the first, finishing off a nice one-touch pass from Pavel Zacha. Then he scored again early in the second, taking off on a 2-on-1 with Marat Khusnutdinov and finishing off Khusntudinov’s return pass.
“He was much better today,” Sturm said of Pastrnak during his NESN postgame interview. “All of them [the top guys], they just were more involved.”
Unfortunately for the Bruins, Pastrnak was the only source of offense in this one, and they ultimately couldn’t make the 2-1 lead hold up. Ten minutes after taking the lead, the Bruins got caught chasing a bit during a 4-on-4 situation and Nick Schmaltz set up Clayton Keller for a tap-in.
When it was time to push for a winning goal, the Bruins didn’t have enough in the tank. In the third period of a 2-2 game, they went more than 15 minutes without landing a shot on goal. The Mammoth weren’t exactly peppering Korpisalo at the other end either, but the Bruins made the one critical mistake, and Utah made them pay.
Khusnutdinov got his pocket picked trying to exit the defensive zone, and JJ Peterka set up Dylan Guenther for a rocket one-timer a second later. Just like that, Utah had the lead.
The Bruins got a chance to tie the game on a late power play, but, in what has become a concerning trend, they couldn’t take advantage. This was the third time in the last four games that the Bruins went to the power play in the third period with a chance to tie the game, and they’re now 0-for-3. On Saturday, they got a third-period power play with a chance to cut Colorado’s lead to one, but couldn’t convert on that one either.
The lack of 5-on-5 chance creation continues to be a concerning trend as well. The Bruins registered just five high-danger chances at 5-on-5 Sunday, according to Natural Stat Trick. The Mammoth had 14. Expected goals at 5-on-5 were 2.71-1.01 in favor of Utah. Boston as a team now ranks dead last in 5-on-5 high-danger chances per 60 minutes.
Only two of the Bruins’ top six forwards recorded a 5-on-5 shot on goal Sunday (Pastrnak and Khusnutdinov, who was back in the lineup after being a healthy scratch the previous two games). Sturm tried yet another second-line combination that proved ineffective, as Khusnutdinov, Pavel Zacha and Viktor Arvidsson spent much of the night pinned in their own zone. The Bruins got outshot 8-2 with them on the ice and outscored 1-0.
Casey Mittelstadt, who had been centering the second line, was a healthy scratch Sunday. As many feared, it is increasingly looking like the Bruins have four top-six forwards at best (Pastrnak, Zacha, Morgan Geekie and Elias Lindholm). Mittelstadt and Arvidsson, who have three points between them this season, have not looked capable of seizing the opportunity Boston has given them.
Sturm liked the Bruins’ effort Sunday, certainly a lot more than he liked their first two games of the road trip.
“Guys battled really hard,” he told NESN. “We didn’t deserve going home empty tonight, that’s for sure.”
That first part might be true. The second part is debatable. Because when it was all said and done, the Bruins really didn’t do enough to win in the game’s biggest moments. And now they’ll have to try end this losing streak against another tough opponent when they return to TD Garden on Tuesday, where the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers and old friend Brad Marchand will be waiting for them.