In a season where so much has already gone right for the Boston Bruins, there haven’t been many lowlights.
So Thursday night’s 4-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues at the Enterprise Center might just qualify as the worst moment of the season, right up there with an empty home loss to the Ottawa Senators almost a month ago. Interestingly, in both games rookie wunderkind James Hagens was the lone goal scorer, and the final result was exactly the same in a game following a disappointing loss to a quality opponent.
“This league humbles you quick when you’re not doing the right things,” said Hampus Lindholm. “We kind of saw that tonight. Over 60 minutes we had too many mistakes and we got punished. I think this team wanted it a little more than us tonight. Sometimes you need to learn from games like this.”
It was a road loss to the Wild almost a month ago and this time it was a loss at the hands of the Carolina Hurricanes, a pair of measuring stick games where the Black and Gold came up woefully short. The letdown – against Ottawa then and St. Louis last night -- was very evident in both efforts and this time there was no denying the disappointment afterward in such a non-competitive game where Boston didn’t decide to really even start playing hard until the third period when it was too late.
And still, mistakes like penalties and shoddy PK work cost them when they were finally trying to right the ship.
“It was definitely unacceptable tonight, especially in the first 40 minutes,” said Marco Sturm to NESN during his 1-on-1 with Andy Brickley following the game. “We got outworked in every hour of the game from top to bottom.”
In most instances, the B’s have been hard to play against and haven’t really beaten themselves with simple mistakes, but they were guilty on both ends in a game where it really looks like they were never engaged. Was it a hangover from the emotional letdown of the loss to Carolina?
It could be that simple, and a busy October could be coming back to bite them as they prepare for an extremely long stretch of team-friendly home games over the next month. Twelve of their next 14 games through the beginning of December will be on home ice and that will take the Black and Gold through the all-important Thanksgiving holiday where a playoff position portends a postseason future this spring.
It’s very likely that a random Thursday night lackluster effort in St. Louis will be forgotten by then as the B’s still sit in first place, but for now things will be focused on manufacturing a much effort against a woebegone Blackhawks team on Saturday.
“Tough road trip. We obviously didn’t play to our standard,” said David Pastrnak. “We don’t create enough and then make too many mistakes. Obviously getting outscored and outshot we need to play more off the shot, play more around the net, spend more time in the O-zone playing off the shot and creating those second opportunities. Don’t be a one-and-done. It’s hard to score in this league, so we need to just get home, get better and get back at it again.
“But the biggest takeaway is that when we are winning, we flip the page. We come to work the next day and get better. It’s hard but we’re going to do the same. So we’re going to go home, get to work and get back in the winning column.”
Certainly there will be material for the team to review when it comes to where it all went wrong. The Blues scored a pair of power play goals off offensive zone faceoff wins where the Bruins were woefully slow to recognize the obvious play coming at them, and there was a general lack of emotional engagement across the board throughout the contest.
It feels, as times, like the Bruins have lost a little bit of their swagger as of late.
One other interesting development, as of late, is some of the young players hitting a rough patch after Frederic Brunet was scratched for Thursday night’s loss in St. Louis in favor of Connor Clifton, and Matt Poitras registering a team-low 8:52 of ice time and a team-worst minus-2 in the defeat after missing a pair of golden scoring chances in the loss to Carolina.
It’s very likely just a bit of a valley in a long season for these key young players, and certainly it didn’t extend to Hagens as he continues to show world class skill and athleticism while amongst the NHL’s leading rookie scorers.
After his goal in the first period, 19-year-old James Hagens now has 5 goals and 6 assists in 16 career games. Those 16 games are the fewest for a Bruins teenager to reach 5 goals and 5 assists since Patrice Bergeron got there in 15 games in 2003. https://t.co/MqHVtSlajv
— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) October 30, 2026
“The effort today in the first 40 minutes was pretty bad,” said Sturm. “For me that’s the most disappointing thing. It’s on us. I don’t think they did anything special. It was just mental breaks on certain individuals, but it felt like it was happening all night. We deserved to come up short like we did today.
“You just can’t play that way. Maybe we needed it? Hopefully it’s going to be a little bit of a wakeup call for us. We’ve just got to move on.”
Interestingly, Sturm was asked about switching around the forward lines and getting different combos, and whether that was done to double-shift Pastrnak and spark some offense late in the game. It was also likely done to perk up Morgan Geekie, who now has just one goal in the first 14 games of the season while passing up too many shooting chances around the net, but it seems clear that the B’s bench boss wasn’t overly enthused with his captain’s play over the last few games.
“[Pastrnak] needed to crank it up the most, I would say,” said Sturm. “I just tried to give him different lines, but it was not about him. Just overall I needed a spark…something.”
It’s interesting times for the Bruins with names like Simon Edvinsson and Dylan Larkin kicking up into higher gear in trade rumors and a burgeoning dynamic of a competitive NHL roster where vets have often been sitting in favor of talented, young rookie players. All of that is easy to push aside when the Bruins are winning, but a couple of losses in a row have the B’s crew looking to find answers anew after one of their most feel-bad losses of the season.
It’s way too soon to overreact with things going so well overall, but too many disconnected efforts like Tuesday night could start to trigger alarm bells if it becomes a pattern.