Here’s What We Learned from the Bruins 3-2 shootout loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena that closed out their regular season outside the playoffs.
1) The Bruins still played to win even after knowing their fate in the third period while reading the visiting scores on the arena scoreboard, and that’s got to count for a little something. It did look like Tuukka Rask had just about had enough when he somehow whiffed at the Victor Hedman wrist shot with his glove hand during the shootout, but the Bruins played hard from beginning to end in Saturday night’s game. It just makes you wonder even more why they couldn’t come up with the same effort vs. Washington and Florida that they managed to harness against the Lightning.
2) Brad Marchand finished the season with a flourish of confidence after getting that late goal against the Panthers, and led the Bruins this season with 24 goals scored. While plenty of credit deserves to go toward Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara and Tuukka Rask for the maximum levels of effort they expended to keep the Bruins afloat for much of this season, Marchand is in among that group as well, and took a big step forward this season in a leadership role. While some other core players might be traded away this summer as the Bruins both change up the mix and get some salary cap relief, Marchand is somebody that’s shown he wants to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
3) The Bruins finished the season as the only reigning President’s Trophy winner and reigning Stanley Cup winner (Los Angeles Kings) in NHL history that didn’t make the playoffs the following season. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
Plus
*Loui Eriksson finished with a goal that gave him 22 goals on the season, three shot attempts, a plus-2 rating and 20:23 of ice time in a solid all-around performance that wrapped up a pretty good bounce-back season for the Swedish winger.
Boston Bruins
*Brad Marchand was all over the place scoring the game-tying goal in the third period, generating eight shot attempts and playing up the physical intensity to the hilt while going on the attack against the Lightning.
*Torey Krug finished with 21:55 of ice time, an assist, a plus-1 rating and another eight generated shot attempts while moving the puck with precision and aggressiveness. Krug actually played pretty well in the absence of Dougie Hamilton over the last few weeks.
Minus
*The unsuccessful attempted glove save by Tuukka Rask on Victor Hedman in the shootout looked like a goalie that didn’t want to be on the ice anymore.
*Dennis Seidenberg and Matt Bartkowski botched a D-to-D pass in their own zone that led to Tampa’s first goal, and gave one more reminder why it’s probably best if those two don’t play together as a pairing.
*No points and no shots on net for David Pastrnak, who had zero points in the last five games of the season while hitting a bit of a wall finally at the bitter end of the season.