BOSTON -- There was no getting around the fact that the Bruins blew a Black and Golden opportunity Sunday night.
They had a chance to capture the Atlantic Division title, nail down top seed in the Eastern Conference and secure home-ice advantage for the first three rounds of the playoffs with two points against the Panthers in their regular-season finale. Instead they played a dreadful opening 40 minutes, got a pretty average performance from goalie Tuukka Rask, and simply made too many mistakes to beat even the soon-to-be-golfing Florida Panthers. The result: A 4-2 home loss that dropped them into second place in the final standings.
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Sure, they still finished with 50 wins and have home ice against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round. But Sunday night's tired, half-baked effort with something on the line didn't leave a good impression on the verge of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
"I'd like to say that we've had that [urgency] for every minute of every single game for the whole season. I just don't think that's realistic" said David Backes, who scored Boston's first goal of the game in the first period. "With an opportunity to win the Atlantic Division [on Sunday], you would've hoped that it was there a little bit more.
"We've got to put this in the rear-view mirror and get that excitement of the playoffs coming up. It's on our front step now. Next time we take the ice, it's going to be in the playoffs and playing for keeps against a team that's trying to end our season. We've got to be thinking that we are going to end their season. That's what's at stake."
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After managing only 17 shots on goal in the first two periods, the Bruins fired off 26 shots in totally dominating the final 20 minutes. But it wasn't enough, and it's a little mystifying that the urgency and the playoff mentality weren't there at the start of Sunday night's game. Or maybe they were, but were overshadowed by nervousness within the games of young players like defenseman Matt Grzelcyk.
Either way, it's over and done with, and simply counts as a missed chance that makes the road a little tougher for the B's. They now have to go through Toronto -- a team that beat them three times in four games during the regular season -- in the first round.
"[The passion in our game] is what we were missing [Sunday], and then [problems with] execution crept in when we . . . started to want to get the game back [because] we did it more as individuals instead of a team," said Bruce Cassidy. "Then, the third we started playing together, but then it's too late; we're chasing the game . . .
"We're not going to allow one game to define us, yet we understand the meaning. We let one get away, an opportunity lost to have home-ice advantage, and we'll see if that haunts us down the road. I think it's too early to tell that right now."
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But Cassidy doesn't think so.
"Thursday, I believe [we] will be the 50-win team that we saw all year," he stated.
To do so, the Bruins will have to push past the disappointment of the last few weeks when they struggled with consistency and put some uncharacteristically mediocre efforts at the tail end of a finishing stretch of 21 games in 39 days.
Now's the time to hit the reset button after their most disappointing loss of the season, which created some rare bad feeling from a team that's created mostly good ones this year.