B's losses mounting - Boston Herald

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B's losses mounting - Boston Herald Mar 12th 2012, 04:40 PITTSBURGH — A familiar story played out for the Bruins [team stats] again yesterday, only this time with more ominous overtones. For the fifth straight game, they spotted their opposition the first goal. For the third time in that span, they allowed the first two goals in the opening 10 minutes of the game. And yesterday, they gave the Penguins — the hottest team in the league — the first three goals of the game in the first period. That, of course, is not a winning formula, and despite yet again fighting back, the Bruins did not win, dropping a 5-2 decision to the Pens while losing one of their three games in hand on the Ottawa Senators (they still have two left). The B's only lead Ottawa by two points atop the Northeast Division. More foreboding is the fact they lost three more players, one of whom is especially vital to the cause. Patrice Bergeron exited after taking a Matt Niskanen shot off the left foot early in the second period. Adam McQuaid had been knocked out of the game earlier when he suffered an upper-body injury while checking James Neal, and Max Sauve left with a lower-body injury. All three players continued on with the team to Tampa Bay, but we'll soon find out whether that constitutes good news. "Right now I haven't been told that anyone's out for a long period of time, and that's basically all we have to go with right now," coach Claude Julien said. "The next day is when you have a better idea." The injury bug already had been taking the steam out of the Bruins' game for some time, with Nathan Horton (concussion), Rich Peverley (knee), Daniel Paille (upper body), Benoit Pouliot (lower body) and Tuukka Rask (groin) on the shelf when the day started. If Bergeron — who tried twice to return to the game but labored noticeably — is out for any period of time, things won't be looking too rosy for a Stanley Cup repeat. "It's very unfortunate that the bench was short and we had to play without some guys," captain Zdeno Chara said. "You obviously have to play smart, have short shifts, and I think we did a pretty good job that way." The B's did, in fact, do well to battle back and make a game of it, but it was another bad start to the contest for them. They had a good chance early when Milan Lucic just missed a centering pass that could have given him an easy goal, and the next thing the B's knew, they were down 2-0 again. Arron Asham swept a deflected puck under Tim Thomas [stats] at 3:24, and Niskanen scored at 7:12 on a long-range shot that may have gone off Chara and in. Neal made it 3-0 late in the period when he beat Thomas on a 5-on-3, and the Pens went into cruise control the rest of the day. Thomas was pulled after the first period for Marty Turco, who played well in his Bruins debut (20 saves on 22 shots). And to their credit, the B's fought back. David Krejci scored two second-period goals sandwiched around a Chris Kunitz tally for the Penguins to make it 4-2 entering the third. The B's had a great chance to cut into the lead again when Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin was called for boarding Johnny Boychuk with 6:31 left in the game. On the man-advantage, Krejci had a chance for a hat trick, but Marc-Andre Fleury (34 saves) made a great stop. Then, with 3:57 left, Pascal Dupuis beat Turco on a breakaway to all but end it. Julien didn't like the start, of course, but he didn't have the heart to rip his team, considering the circumstances. "It was disappointing to again have to dig ourselves out of a hole, but I think with the situation we had with a short bench, down to three lines and five (defensemen), I thought our guys battled hard," Julien said. "The way we played this afternoon, I'm certainly not going to criticize my team. "We showed a lot of guts to at least be able to keep the pace, especially after we went down by three goals. We got a couple of goals back. We had a great second period, but again, not enough at the end to get over that hump." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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