Talking points from the Bruins' 5-0 loss to the Panthers. . .
GOLD STAR: The Panthers have been hyping up Aleksander Barkov as a Patrice Bergeron-type player ready to ascend at the NHL level, and he sure looked like it on Tuesday night against the Bruins. Barkov was in the middle of all kinds of good things for Florida offensively with three assists and a plus-1 rating in 22:16 of ice time. Barkov only had a couple of shot attempts and a couple of blocked shots, but was also a beast on the draw while winning 17-of-29 face-offs and pretty much controlling the middle of the ice when he was out there. Barkov was the best player on the ice, Mike Hoffman was the second best player and Jonathan Huberdeau was right there too, so that doesn’t leave a lot of room for any B’s players of significance.
BLACK EYE: Torey Krug had a rough game, and that’s an understatement. Krug was on ice for three of the five goals scored by the Panthers, and was torched along with Ryan Donato on Mike Matheson’s end-to-end rush up the ice that finished with a goal for Florida. Similarly, Krug fell down in the first period on the PP and that allowed Troy Brouwer to go on a shorthanded breakaway chance that Jaroslav Halak actually stopped at the end of the first period. On the other end of the ice only managed to get two of his shot attempts on net and had a couple of giveaways for a B’s team that was playing way too loose with the puck. Krug has had some bumps in the road defensively in recent games as he tries to turn up the offense, but it was much worse than that against Florida.
TURNING POINT: The Bruins just completely dropped the ball in the second period after being lucky to get out of the first period without any score. They allowed 20 shots on net to the Panthers, gave up four goals when they are barely scraping together for 2-3 goals per game in their weakened state and also saw Jaroslav Halak give up some goals that he hadn’t allowed much in the first few months of the season. Once the middle 20 minutes of the game had settled in, the Bruins knew they had no shot of coming back after they’d gone far away from their good defense/strong power play formula that had allowed them to win games for a while. It seems that they’re going to need a change to their approach, or get some players back and healthy in a hurry.
HONORABLE MENTION: Mike Hoffman was all over the place for the Panthers with a whopping nine shots on net, and he scored a pair of goals for Florida including the first one that really got the ball rolling. Hoffman finished with the two goals and a plus-1 rating with 20:16 of ice time, 10 shot attempts while crashing the net and cranking one-timers in a nice show of what he can do offensively when he’s at his best. The first goal also turned out to be the game-winner for the Panthers when the Bruins couldn’t manage to even get a single goal on the board through 60 minutes. So credit Hoffman with stepping up his game for a Florida team that needs to get their act together if they’re going to start climbing through the Atlantic Division standings.
BY THE NUMBERS: 19 – the number of giveaways for the Bruins in a game where they didn’t protect the puck, didn’t play defense and really didn’t bring much of anything to the table on a Tuesday night in Florida.
Boston Bruins
QUOTE TO NOTE: “At times it just looked like men against boys out there.” –Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy accurately describing a 5-0 butt-kicking at the hands of the Florida Panthers on Tuesday night.
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