Bruins Battle for One Point in OT Loss

What do you get when you combine a player with a career-high number of shots on goal and a goaltender with a career-high saves? You get a hockey game where the Boston Bruins host the Edmonton Oilers. You get a 20-shots-on-goal third period by the Bruins. You get a tie game that goes to overtime. And in the end the Oilers get to extend their winning streak to six games and the Bruins at least get a point for their efforts.

If you’re a Bruins fan, you don’t get a win at home—something that continues to plague the Bruins. After Monday night’s overtime loss, Boston now sits at 6-7-2 in home games this season.

“Yeah. It’s something we’ve talked a lot about, improving our home record,” said Patrice Bergeron afterwards. “And tonight was a great opportunity for us to do that and we didn’t come out with the win. So we definitely have to be better.”

“You know, you want to be a good team at home. You have to be a dominating presence and we haven’t been that so far this year,” Brad Marchand agreed.

For Marchand, his career-high nine shots on goal would ultimately result in the game-tying goal on that ninth shot, off a pass from recently acquired Landon Ferraro who had been promoted to the first line with Bergeron and Marchand in the third.

“It’s important that we got a point out of it, but I think that we played great hockey for 50 minutes,” said Ferraro. “But that’s been the problem that we’ve had—lapses at different points of the games and it costs us.”

And unfortunately the new three-on-three overtime play is just another situation where the opposing team can pounce on a mistake and make the team pay. And that’s what happened Monday night. Head coach Claude Julien could not put out the line that he probably would have preferred because they had just spent a considerable amount of effort at the end of the game. A mistake on Ferraro’s part resulted in an extremely short overtime period and an Oilers’ win, giving them a 5-2-0 record this season in the extra frame.

Cam Talbot

“We’ve been pretty fortunate on three-on-three that we’ve got a quick team, a skilled team, so I think it favors us a little bit,” said Oilers goaltender Cam Talbot.

While everyone who was dressed in black and gold would have preferred to be talking about a win, the insane abilities of Talbot are really what got the Oilers the win. He denied a career-high 47 of 49 shots, with 20 of those coming at him in the third period.

“Yeah, I think that might have been my best game all year,” Talbot said. “We got off pretty hard in the first there and they started off pretty strong like we expected them to. They are not the kind of team that will just sit back and let you take it to them. Give them credit. They’re a very resilient team.”

And perhaps that resiliency is a positive that needs to be acknowledged, despite the loss. Earlier in the season the Bruins would not have been as likely to come back the way they did on Monday night. Despite going into the second period on the penalty kill carryover from the Dennis Seidenberg hooking with just 39 seconds remaining of that first frame, the Bruins continued to bring their game.

“I think the way we battled till the end,” Bergeron said of positives to take from the game. “Every line was really contributing and having a lot of zone time and a lot of chances and that’s definitely something we can build on.”

Stick bender Brad Marchand (Photo: Alan Sullivan)

Marchand agreed with Bergeron and added some other important positives that the team needs to embrace and carry forward.

“We played a pretty full game. I thought we played pretty well pretty much the entire game. We did a really good job of coming back from a two-goal deficit,” he said. “And I thought we did a much better job in the second period where we’ve lacked at times in the season. So we’re getting better in that area and that’s something we want to build off of.”

However, there are definitely no rose-tinted glasses being worn in the Bruins locker room. While each player acknowledged the positives, they also pointed out that in the end the loss of any points is unacceptable.

“It’s still not good enough when you lose points, so there’s work to be done,” Marchand stressed.

Full interview with Patrice Bergeron after the game: