Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After starting the season with a remarkable 19-0-3 record at home, the Bruins finally suffered their first home regulation loss of the season on Thursday, falling to the Seattle Kraken 3-0.
Here are three reasons this was the night Boston finally met its match:
Bruins’ slow start
The Bruins have been no strangers to slow starts this season, but they’re so much better than the vast majority of their opponents that they usually find a way to overcome them and win anyways. Being the best third-period team in the NHL certainly hasn’t hurt.
On Thursday, though, the Bruins ran into a team that was good enough to put them in a hole and keep them there. The Kraken outshot the Bruins 14-8 in the first period and took a 1-0 lead 7:14 into the game when Brandon Tanev tipped in a Daniel Sprong shot.
There’s a reason hockey has a cliché about starting slow in the first game home after a road trip, and while the Bruins didn’t want to use that as an excuse, they clearly didn’t come out playing the way they had during their dominant three-game California trip. Combine that with them facing one of the hottest teams in the NHL -- Seattle has now won seven in a row -- and you have a recipe for a loss.
“I think it just took us a while to get to our game, if we even got there,” Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy said after the game. “They came in and played well, but we just didn’t do enough for 60 minutes.”
Kraken’s 5-on-5 play
There aren’t many teams that can keep up with the Bruins’ depth at 5-on-5 play, but the Kraken are one of the few teams that has a chance. While the B’s entered the night first in 5-on-5 goal differential at plus-40, the Kraken weren’t far behind in second place at plus-35. After a plus-2 in Seattle’s favor on Thursday, it’s now just a one-goal edge Boston is clinging to.
The Kraken controlled play for long stretches of the game and spent a lot of time in the Bruins’ zone, especially in the first half of the game. They showed off their own depth with goals from their “third” and “fourth” lines. We use the quotation marks because Seattle’s offensive attack is so balanced that there’s not a lot of difference between their first and fourth lines in either production or ice time.
Their first goal came from fourth-liners Tanev and Sprong, who are both over 20 points for the season. The second was scored by third-liner Eeli Tolvanen, who now has six points in seven games with the Kraken since they claimed him off waivers from Nashville. The Kraken might not have the high-end talent that the Bruins do, but they do have the depth, and they found a way to keep Boston’s high-end talent quiet.
“Their team structure’s excellent,” Bruins coach Jim Montgomery said of the Kraken. “I thought their speed defensively gave us a lot of problems, like on the forecheck, in the neutral zone, especially in the d-zone. We were kind of one-and-done in the offensive zone, and I think that was a credit to how fast they played defensively.”
The Bruins’ biggest advantage over the Kraken, on paper, would have been their third-ranked power play against Seattle’s 31st-ranked penalty kill, but the B’s only got one power play on the night and fumbled it away with sloppy passing and a couple miscommunications.
Martin Jones stands on his head
Remember Martin Jones? He was a Bruin for all of four days back in the summer of 2015. A highly rated young goalie at the time (the Bruins got Sean Kuraly and a first-round pick in return for him), Jones has mostly been an average-at-best goalie since.
Unfortunately for the Bruins, Jones has been on a heater recently and stayed hot through Thursday night. He stopped all 27 shots he faced and is now 6-0-0 with a .946 save percentage over his last six starts.
While the Bruins struggled to create good looks early in the game, they did test Jones more as the game went on. Late in the second, he made three good saves in a matter of seconds on shots from Hampus Lindholm, Trent Frederic and Taylor Hall. Late in the third, he stood tall when the Bruins turned up the heat by pulling their goalie with five minutes to go trailing by two. One goal with a couple minutes left could have made things interesting, but Jones held long enough (and got a little help from a couple David Pastrnak misfires) for the Kraken to seal the win with an empty-netter.
Having your goalie stand on his head has pretty much been a prerequisite for beating the Bruins this season, and Jones did that Thursday night. In the Bruins’ last seven losses, opposing goalies have faced an average of 40 shots on goal and have a .947 save percentage.
So, there you have it. Did the Kraken provide a blueprint for beating the Bruins at the Garden? Sure. Catch them on an off night, be one of the few teams that can even come close to matching their depth, and get a great goaltending performance. Simple, right?
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