On one hand, Marco Sturm and the Boston Bruins can hang their hat on going toe-to-toe with the high-octane, rush-you-out-of-the-building Golden Knights offense on Thursday night. Especially in their absolutely deafening building.
But on the other hand, the Bruins realize that the 6-5 final they dropped at T-Mobile Arena is not the kind of game that the Bruins want to play in 2025-26 with any sort of regularity. At least if they’re to play with the structure, they’ll need to be successful.
“For me, it’s a mindset going in,” a frustrated Sturm said following the defeat. “Do you want to play a 1-0 game or do you want to play that open game? We’ve done it now two or three games in a row. We got lucky once because of goaltending, but other than that, that’s not us. That’s not us. I don’t want to play that game. I’m a defensive mindset coach, I would say, and it starts from there.”
After what was their leakiest performance of the season on Monday afternoon against the Lightning, things got worse for the Bruins in Vegas on Thursday night. In addition to the leaks that the club found themselves unable to patch up, the Bruins opened the freeway up to the high-octane and rush-loving Knights, and took enough penalties to make Sturm chew through an entire bucket of gum.
Good for Super Bubble’s business, sure, but bad for the Black and Gold.
“We knew it was going to be tough here [and] we just gotta be smarter than that,” Sturm noted. “We still have a lot of really good players in our lineup. But that’s not our standard. We just gotta be way better. We have to buy in on our defensive effort, and that was just not the case today.”
There’s something to be said for the Bruins fighting their way back into a competitive finish for the second straight game, of course. But it also didn’t have to be this way for the Black and Gold, given the way they started. Boston started hot with Tanner Jeannot’s net-front finish, and even when the Knights responded with a goal of their own a minute and a half later, the Bruins punched back with a Nikita Zadorov at the 16:44 mark of the opening frame. But the Golden Knights responded once again, this time just 1:49 later.
And the Knights made sure they carried that momentum into the second period.
In what was a four-goal second period between the teams, the Golden Knights scored three of them, and each one appeared easier than the one that came before. The Bruins, by all means, forgot about Pavel Dorofeyev on a power play, and it was Mark Stone who baited the Bruins into an ill-timed, power-play pass that sparked William Karlsson for a shorthanded goal at the other end.
It was, by all means, a shooting gallery on Swayman.
And, again, that’s not the kind of game this B’s team is built to play.
“Just easy breakdowns, easy mistakes, easy mistakes on the reads, too,” Sturm offered. “Not just from our young guys, but from our top guys too. When you’re going to chase the game, it’s hard to come back.”
If you’re looking for a positive to take from this loss, it’s absolutely the play of Boston’s bottom-six forward grouping. They actually carried the team in this one, believe it or not. Bottom-six forwards scored three of the B’s five goals in the losing effort, and the fourth line was on the ice and screened the Vegas netminder on the Nikita Zadorov goal late in the first period of play.
“Why was it the best line? They did their job, and they played in their end the whole time because they went behind them and they worked,” Sturm said. “That’s what we talked about before the game. But we only had one line.
“And that was the problem.”
The Bruins will look to fix their problems Saturday night when they visit Colorado for a showdown with the Avalanche.
