TAMPA, Fla. -- When it came down to it for the Boston Bruins in this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, it wasn’t about the questionable officiating, Brad Marchand opting for a licking strategy with Boston’s opponents or even about Tuukka Rask’s much-discussed big game performance ahead of this postseason.
Instead, it was about a Bruins team that made a nice progression from last season to this season by advancing a round in the postseason, and about a Black and Gold group that clearly wasn’t better than the Tampa Bay Lightning over the course of a seven-game series. Certainly, with a break or two, the Bruins could have pushed the second-round series to six or seven games instead of their ultimate five-game, ouster.
But at the end of the day, Tampa Bay proved was faster, deeper and far better on the back end than the Bruins, and completely squelched a Boston offense that had been abundantly productive all season.
“It’s very disappointing with the team that we have, and the way that we played all year,” said Patrice Bergeron. “All along we were finding ways [to win] and everybody was contributing so we obviously believed that we had a great team. It’s disappointing that we couldn’t have done a lot more. We believed that we had a better team.”
The hard-checking, big-bodied Tampa Bay defense held all Bruins forwards without an even-strength goal in the final four games of the playoff series, and the Bruins as a team didn’t have a 5-on-5 goal in the final three losses to the Lightning.
The Bruins power play crew kept them competitive in all of those losses, but the bottom line is that a team isn’t going to enjoy long-term success in the postseason if they can’t score even strength goals against quality defenses.
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“They’re a good team and they were a good team all year. They compete extremely hard. They have a lot of speed and they’ve very tenacious,” said Brad Marchand. “They were better than we were in a lot of areas [like] puck battles and puck pursuit. It showed up in the end.
“They played a very good system 5-on-5, and they were better than we were. You can’t rely on special teams every night to win games. They help for sure, but you have to be able to produce 5-on-5. We weren’t able to do that.”
Subtracting Torey Krug (left ankle) and David Backes (head injury) from the Bruins lineup in the last couple of games certainly didn’t help matters either, but the bottom line is that the Bruins didn’t do much of anything beyond their top line players. Meanwhile, Tampa’s second line of Braydon Point, Tyler Johnson and Ondrej Palat were the dominant force in the series for either of the two teams and picking things up for the Lightning until Nikita Kucherov and Steve Stamkos finally got going offensively at the end of the series.
It certainly started off on a good note, with Rick Nash scoring two goals in Boston’s Game 1 win as it appeared they might be able to count on more secondary offense. But that’s clearly not how things played out for a B’s offense that struggled mightily to hold the puck in the offensive end, and then wasn’t able to capitalize on enough of their chances either.
“I think if we look back at the whole season, there is a lot that we can be proud of,” said Zdeno Chara. “There is a lot we can take from these [games] and use as a positive. We went through some obstacles this season and I thought we handled them really. We weren’t just satisfied with that and kept pushing ourselves.
“We were in all of those games, but we came up short in a couple of them. In a couple of [those games there were some momentum switches that we didn’t agree with, and we had to move on. Today it was just a big fight and a battle for 60 minutes, and we needed that second goal. I thought we deserved it, so right now it’s disappointing because we felt and believed that it was going to happen.”
There was certainly some disappointment on the Bruins end as they went down with a little bit of a whimper in five games to the Lightning, and the tenor of this second series vs. Tampa Bay would have changed dramatically if they’d pulled out Game 4 vs. the Bolts rather than losing it in frustrating fashion in overtime. But at the end of the day, it’s about a Boston Bruins organization that took a significant step forward with both their regular season and playoff performance this year. Deep down inside the veteran players may have known they were a year ahead of schedule with their Cup aspirations given the large contingent of rookies in the lineup.
But it also felt like something special was going on when they were the best team in the NHL for a three-plus month span during the regular season. The Bruins were never really able to get that level in the postseason as quality hockey teams like Tampa Bay elevated their game, and left the Bruins behind looking for a little bit better luck next year.