The Bruins lost 5-1 at home Monday night to a Blues team that is currently outside the playoff picture. That is an ugly result. The Boston fans who were left at TD Garden at the final buzzer booed their team off the ice.
You might have expected the head coach to share that frustration after the game. Maybe rip his team or play disappointed parent or threaten to make changes, like he did after a 3-0 loss to the Capitals last month.
Instead, Montgomery sounded calm and unconcerned after Monday's loss.
"You have nights like this where the puck doesn't go your way, you don't have puck luck. Just, it happens," he said.
So, that's it? Not a lot you can do about it?
"I think on most nights we have done a lot about it," Montgomery countered. "We have 91 points. We have a good hockey team. We weren't good tonight."
To be clear, there were some things Montgomery didn't like about his team's game. He said they didn't have enough intensity at the start of the game. He acknowledged they gave up too many odd-man rushes, including "a breakdown by a couple of players" on St. Louis' third goal, which essentially put the game to bed.
But he liked the number of chances his team created, even if they struggled to finish them.
"We created a lot of good scoring chances," Montgomery said. "We missed the net. They blocked shots. Their desperation probably defensively was a little higher than ours."
And you know what? Montgomery is right about that. Fans don't want to hear about shot attempts and scoring chances and expected goals; most only care about actual goals. But it is worth differentiating between types of losses.
On the scoreboard, Monday night looks awfully similar to last Saturday's 5-1 loss to the Islanders, or that 4-1 loss to Calgary and the aforementioned 3-0 loss to Washington in the first week after the All-Star break.
This wasn't the same, though. Those three were all legitimate no-shows, games where it looked the Bruins had no intention of working hard enough to create scoring chances.
The Bruins' shot totals in those three games were 22, 18 and 23. They had 35 shots on goal Monday night, plus another 16 attempts that missed the net and 12 more that were blocked.
They had 21 high-danger chances Monday night (and only eight against, by the way). In those other three losses combined, they had a total of 22. Their 4.05 expected goals on Monday were double what they had in any of those other three.
We can run through some of the great looks that wouldn't go. A point-blank redirect by Morgan Geekie that was stopped. A near-breakaway for Jesper Boqvist that Joel Hofer turned aside with a great save. Two rapid-fire chances for Jake DeBrusk at the top of the crease that Hofer kept out. A backdoor would-be tap-in for Trent Frederic that he just missed.
Then there's the controversial no-goal. With 8:49 left in the second and the Bruins trailing 3-0, Justin Brazeau drove to the net and had his shot deflect off Torey Krug's stick, over Hofer's shoulder, and in. But the Blues challenged for offsides earlier in the shift, won the challenge, and the goal came off the board.
The controversy was that it looked like Krug dragged the puck back into his own zone, which should have negated the offsides. The NHL's official explanation of the review didn't even address that point. Montgomery said the ref explained to him that Krug's touching of the puck was a "battle play" and not a "possession play." The NHL's own rulebook, however, does not specify that Krug would have needed possession. Absent a better explanation from the league, it seems like they might have just straight-up blown the call.
Would the game have been different if the goal counted? The Bruins still would have been down by two. Maybe there would have been enough time left in the game to make things interesting.
They had already made too many mistakes to put themselves in a hole, though, from back-to-back stick fouls from Charlie Coyle and Frederic in the first period that handed the Blues a 5-on-3 goal, to a bad pinch by Mason Lohrei and bad neutral-zone defense by David Pastrnak on St. Louis' third goal. More poor team defense in transition and a lost net-front battle by Kevin Shattenkirk allowed the Blues to push it to 4-0 by the second intermission.
Montgomery may not have threatened to make any lineup changes, but the bet here is that there will be a couple for Thursday's game in Montreal. The third pairing of Lohrei and Shattenkirk had an especially rough night. And while both had been playing pretty well recently otherwise, that might be an easy place to do a little bit of rotating.
Parker Wotherspoon is due to get back in the lineup after sitting the last two games. Deadline addition Andrew Peeke could be ready for his Bruins debut, too. Montgomery wanted to get him some practice time first; he'll have two practices under his belt by Thursday. Wotherspoon and Peeke were paired together at Monday's morning skate, so it might make sense to keep them together and just sub out the whole pair.
