The Boston Bruins have had better days than Thursday night, that’s for sure.
The Bruins lost 4-1 to the Pittsburgh Penguins at TD Garden after a lackluster performance from the Black and Gold. Some sloppy transition defense and lack of veterans being able to manage the puck helped give Pittsburgh its fifth straight win.
A lot didn’t go right for the Bruins, and head coach Bruce Cassidy knows as much. He offered quite the blunt assessment after the loss explaining why his team had trouble executing.
“We’ve had trouble executing for a while now,” Cassidy said. “It’s one of the reasons our offensive numbers are down. We’re not clean, we don’t take care of the puck well enough.”
Cassidy is confident in his team, though.
“I trust this team to bounce back,” he said. They’re very resilient. We’ve proven that over the years. We don’t really go into these long stretches. We had a back-to-back in New York this year — Rangers, Islanders — where we let games get away from us. But we’ve had games like this where we don’t respect the process. We don’t respect taking care of the puck … A lot of it was our top guys tonight, our younger guys are learning the ropes here a little bit. But we gotta do a better job at taking care of the puck, it’s that simple.”
Here are some other notes from Thursday’s Bruins-Penguins game:
— Brandon Carlo left the game after playing just 6:59 with what the team called an upper-body injury. Cassidy didn’t have much of an update on the defenseman afterward.
“Upper-body,” he said. “That’s all I got. He left, didn’t come back. That’s never a good sign.”
Cassidy was hopeful to have more of an update Friday.
— Other blueliners took a beating, too.
Jeremy Lauzon left briefly in the first period. He did return in the second after receiving some stitches due to being cut with a blade. Charlie McAvoy was on the receiving end of a big hit that left him a bit shaken up going into the second intermission, and Matt Grzelcyk took a puck off his helmet.
— Brad Marchand, who scored the Bruins’ lone goal, wants the team to be more physical.
“I think we could all be a little more physical at times,” he said. “We seem to do it in spurts. It’s something we need to do from the drop of the puck, all game long. We just seem to be a better team when we’re more physical. We create more turnovers, create more opportunities, keep more pucks alive.”
— Dan Vladar made some key saves in the first period to keep the game scoreless after 20 minutes. He finished with 19 saves on the night, and shouldered a lot of the blame.
“I don’t care how the team plays in front of me,” he said. “I want to save every shot so I kind of disappointed myself. I want to give my team a chance to win and it wasn’t enough tonight.”
The goalie predicted a win Saturday when the Bruins once again face the Penguins at TD Garden.
