The Bruins are a combined 14 minutes and 17 seconds away from being at least four points better than they’ll wake up on Thursday morning.
That’s 26 seconds in an Oct. 21 loss to the Panthers. Four minutes and 33 seconds in an Oct. 23 loss to the Ducks in Boston. Five minutes and 43 seconds in Ottawa last week, and three minutes and 35 seconds in Anaheim on Wednesday. In all four games, that’s how close the then-tied Bruins were to overtime in those games, where at least one ‘loser’ point awaited them. Instead, it’s when Bruins surrendered what would be the game-winning goal.
Had they earned those four points (and perhaps more given their 3-0 overtime record this season), they’d not only be the best team in their division, but find themselves tied with Carolina as the second-best team in the NHL.
Considering they’ve only lost 10 games in regulation this season, this also means they’ve been less than six minutes away from going to overtime in four of their 10 losses (40 percent). Expand it to less than 10 minutes, and you can add the loss in Utah back in October and that number jumps to five.
It’s becoming a trend the Bruins themselves cannot ignore.
“You look back on these [games], and it’s kind of two points we threw away again,” Bruins winger Morgan Geekie said after Wednesday’s defeat.
“Frustrating, you know? We’re in it except the last 10 minutes,” Joonas Korpisalo, who has been the goaltender in net for the Bruins in three of these losses now, echoed. “It sucks to lose in the last five minutes once again.”
That ‘once again’ certainly had some zip on it, too.
Given where the Bruins are right now as the second-best team in the Atlantic, four points might not be the end of the world right now. But these things have a tendency to come back to bite you. And perhaps especially so in an Eastern Conference where the best team and second-worst team are separated by a mere eight points, and with American Thanksgiving around the corner.
“We’ve done it, what, four or five times this year already? Could’ve had four points at least. Could it be eight?” Bruins defenseman Nikita Zadorov said. “You get the game to overtime, [and] those points are important.”
To Zadorov’s point, the Bruins are one of just two teams in all of the NHL to not have a ‘loser point’ to their name this season. The reigning Presidents’ Trophy-winning Jets, at 12-7-0, are the other. In the proverbial NHL pecking order, the Jets operate with a bit more wiggle room than the Bruins in the We’ll Be Completely Fine Dept., so those points aren’t ‘musts’ there like they are here.
On a similar note, this is the first time the Bruins have gone at least 22 games into a season with a zero in their ‘OTL’ column since their record-breaking 2022-23 season. The Bruins started that campaign 19-3-0, so nobody was worried about points being left on the table. Before that, and in modern B’s history, it last happened to the club in 2016-17, as well as 2014-15. In 2016-17, the Bruins made the playoffs by a single point. They not only had to go on a white-hot run under Bruce Cassidy to get there, but they also had to stave off a Lightning team that racked up OTLs like candy down the stretch. In 2014-15, meanwhile, they missed the playoffs a mere two points despite having 14 overtime losses (four of which came in their final nine losses of the year).
Again, these things have a way of coming back home to you.
Perhaps no year personified that more than Boston’s 2015-16 season. An imperfect team from start to finish, the Bruins put themselves in a position where they had to win the final game of the regular season to qualify for the playoffs. That game, as we all know, was the infamous ‘Tuukka Rask food poisoning’ game where the worst case scenario became a reality for the Bruins and they lost that game and missed the playoffs by a tiebreaker with Detroit. Two more overtime losses and that tiebreaker doesn’t even matter.
To boil this down to poise might be an oversimplification of the situation. But it is something that feels telling. All year long, the Bruins fight like hell to make games close and tight. (This is one thing where the Bruins do deserve some credit, as they have become a team that just straight-up pisses off the opposition with how they refuse to die. The PNV Bruins, they are indeed.)
But when they do get things back even, things go haywire, seemingly out of nowhere. Everything’s just a bit messier, more disjointed, and troublesome.
That’s not just your eyes telling you that, either.
When tied this season, the Bruins are surrendering Bruins are posting a 3.04 expected goals against per 60. That’s the ninth-worst rate in the NHL. Their 13.21 high-danger chances against per 60 is the sixth-worst. And their last line of defense, the goaltending tandem of Korpisalo and Jeremy Swayman, has combined for an .877 save percentage when tied (eighth-worst in the NHL).
Those qualities were on display in the final half of the third period of Wednesday’s loss to the Ducks, too. Zadorov said the game ‘completely flipped’ on them. Geekie, who has now scored five goals to tie the game for the Bruins this season (second-most in the NHL), acknowledged it as yet another missed opportunity when the Bruins played on their heels.
It’s bleeding that the Bruins gotta stop. Or, at the very least, make count.
“We’re already 25 percent into the season, it’s time to mature a little bit, take responsibility, and play like a man,” said Zadorov.