Monday night's overtime loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning, which featured a pair of blown third-period leads, went down about as easily as dry, overcooked turkey for the Bruins.
A bounce-back 3-1 win over the Florida Panthers Wednesday night sent the Bruins home for Thanksgiving with a much better taste in their mouths.
With the win, the Bruins improve to 14-1-3 on the season and end up with three of four points on their Florida dads trip. They also improve to 2-0 against the Panthers, the team that stunned them in the first round in the spring.
Obviously, regular-season wins can't avenge that playoff defeat, but the Panthers are a team the Bruins should measure themselves against, especially since they're currently the top two teams in the Atlantic Division.
So far, the 2023-24 Bruins are measuring up pretty well. Here are five takeaways from Wednesday's win:
Bruins withstand early hits
The Panthers are always a pretty physical team, but they opened Wednesday's game with some extra juice and one particular score to settle. When these teams last met on Oct. 30, Charlie McAvoy hit Panthers defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson in the head, which resulted in a four-game suspension.
The Panthers made sure to finish their hits on McAvoy early and often, and they weren't afraid to toe or even cross the line. Ryan Lomberg took a late run and knocked McAvoy down in the corner. Nick Cousins caught McAvoy in the face with the butt end of his stick while finishing a hard hit. Both of those went uncalled, and that kind of set the tone for much of the first period.
The Bruins were on their heels for too much of the game's first 15 minutes and weren't handling Florida's physicality well at all, which was also a problem in the playoffs. The Panthers registered nine of the game's first 12 shots on goal.
Linus Ullmark stood tall in net, though, and the Bruins finally settled in and started to build some momentum of their own late in the period with a good forecheck and a couple sustained offensive-zone shifts. Charlie Coyle scoring the game's first goal (more on that next) and Derek Forbort dropping the gloves with Jonah Gadjovich early in the second seemed to tame the Panthers a bit.
Coyle keeps rolling
The first 15 minutes of the game proved to be the Panthers' strongest push of the night, but they didn't have a goal to show for it. Instead, it was the Bruins who took a 1-0 lead into the first intermission thanks to Charlie Coyle.
During a 4-on-4, Coyle picked up a drop pass from Danton Heinen in the neutral zone, raced into the offensive zone with a cut inside Matthew Tkachuk and then another quick move around Brandon Montour, and finished with a sweet backhander past Sergei Bobrovsky.
It was Coyle's second goal in as many games and his fourth point in the last three. He now has 16 points (7 goals, 9 assists) in 18 games this season, which ranks third on the team behind only David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand. It also puts him on pace for 73 points this season.
It was fair to wonder before the season if Coyle could produce like a top-two center. So far, he definitely is.
Beecher scores again
Like Coyle, Johnny Beecher seemed to enjoy having dad in the stands, as he also scored for a second straight game.
After the Panthers tied the game midway through the second period, Beecher got the lead back 41 seconds later when he followed up a Patrick Brown miss, deked around Bobrovsky, and tried to tuck the puck inside the post. Beecher actually lost the puck, but got some luck as it banked in off Ekman-Larsson anyways.
Beecher, a 22-year-old rookie, has been doing the dirty work required of a fourth-line center all season. He's been strong defensively (team-best 1.54 expected goals against per 60 minutes) while getting a lot of defensive-zone shifts (14% offensive-zone start percentage). He wins faceoffs (7-of-9 Wednesday, 54.3% for the season). He's a regular part of the league's best penalty kill. He's tied with Trent Frederic for the team lead in hits.
Add in an uptick in offense over the last couple weeks (3 goals in 7 games), and the Bruins have themselves a really good-looking fourth-line center.
"He's just doing a good job," Bruins coach Jim Montgomery said of Beecher. "He's digging in and he's getting rewarded with more ice time."
DeBrusk gets off the schneid
No Bruin needed a goal more than Jake DeBrusk, and he picked a good time to get one. DeBrusk entered Wednesday with just one goal on the season, none in his last seven games, and just one point in his last six.
Less than a minute after Ullmark robbed Kevin Stenlund to keep the Bruins ahead 2-1, DeBrusk scored the kind of blue-collar goal everyone wants to see him scoring to make it a two-goal game. He and Matt Poitras combined to win possession on the forecheck, and then DeBrusk took the puck right to the net. Bobrovsky saved the first shot, but DeBrusk banged home his own rebound.
Montgomery said Saturday night that he thought DeBrusk had played his best game of the season against Montreal. He liked his game Monday in Tampa, too. DeBrusk needed a goal to follow at some point, though, and it finally did Wednesday.
"I thought the last two games, he's played really well," Montgomery said of DeBrusk Wednesday night. "I thought today, it's good to see him stick with it. Because, yeah, you know it's wearing on him. Get a big goal like that to put us up by two, it was the nice cushion we needed going into the third."
Poitras deserves some praise here as well, not just for the assist on DeBrusk's goal, but also for his all-around game Wednesday. After getting benched for much of the third period Monday, the rookie responded with a strong outing and didn't shy away from Florida's physicality at all, as he was more than willing to go into the corners, throw a couple hits, and even mix it up after whistles. Combined with the play of Beecher's line, it was a great night for the Bruins' bottom six.
This time, Bruins shut the door in third
The Bruins were not good enough in the third period Monday in Tampa, when they let a pair of leads slip away. They haven't been a particularly great third-period team for the season in general.
They were much better in the third period Wednesday, though. The Bruins didn't just hang on for the win. They really put the clamps on the Panthers and prevented them from ever mounting anything resembling a comeback.
They limited the Panthers to six shots on goal in the period and just one high-danger chance, according to Natural Stat Trick. A lot of Florida possessions were one-and-done, with the Bruins quickly winning pucks back and cleanly clearing the zone – something that has been an issue this season and was also an issue in the playoffs.
The Bruins certainly had to lean on Ullmark earlier in the game, but protecting the 3-1 lead in the third was much more of a team effort.
"I thought we were really good on our rush defense," Montgomery said. "I thought we had numbers back. We had layers. We were getting pieces of skin, which is putting bodies on bodies. So, we had a little bit of time to make good breakout plays."
Bonus Takeaway: Montgomery delivered a pretty great pregame speech that you should watch below. The theme was making their dads, who were on this road trip with the team, proud -- with special acknowledgment for David Pastrnak and Linus Ullmark, whose dads have passed away.
