Bruins winger Jakub Lauko left frustrated after Game 3 penalty proves costly
With his team down by three and in need of a jolt, Bruins winger Jakub Lauko won a foot race to a 50-50 puck against the Panthers’ Aaron Ekblad and barreled down towards Sergei Bobrovsky’s crease.
But it was Lauko himself, not the puck, that ultimately crashed into Bobrovsky’s cage, and with significant help from Ekblad’s grip on Lauko on the way to the high-impact collision. The referee’s arm went up and appeared to indicate that the Bruins were going to get a power-play opportunity out of the crash, but in what was a theme in a frustrating Game 3 loss, those cheers turned to thunderous boos when it was deemed that Lauko was going to be the one going to the box.
And, of course, the Panthers would score on the ensuing power play and by all means put this game to bed at 4-0, though the Bruins put up a late fight and at one point cut the deficit to two. It was a truly game-changing call in the sense that it zapped any hope out of Boston making things truly interesting, and one that left Lauko wondering what he could’ve done differently on that play.
“I don’t know if I even can say something about it,” Lauko said after the loss. “I don’t know what was the rule on this particular play. But I don’t have much room to avoid the goalie, to be honest.
“I was trying to get to the net and just ended [crashing] up into the goalie. I felt that [Ekblad] was holding me and pushing me and pushing me inside. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to avoid it.”
Lauko did his part to make up for his penalty by scoring Boston’s first goal of the evening in his first shift after the penalty and Florida power-play goal. But the bitterness of the goal against was still there after the loss, especially when you consider how a non-call (or even a B’s power-play opportunity there, which, again, seemed to be the original ruling) could’ve changed things from a momentum standpoint and made Boston’s late-game push one that saw them looking for just one goal and not two.
“Those sort of things are kind of like hard to accept,” Lauko admitted. “But, you know, that’s part of the game, and we need to play through it.”
The Bruins enter Game 4 having taken 13 minor penalties compared to Florida’s seven through the first three games of this second-round series.
Bruins Game-Breaker: From momentum to disaster in second period
The Bruins had life.
It was only 1-0. Goaltender Jeremy Swayman had just made a massive save to snuff out a 2-on-1 rush. They kept the puck in the Panthers’ end for 1:11 straight at one point. They forechecked, they stayed strong on the puck, strong along the boards, strong at the blue line.
But all it took was one play at the other end to extinguish the Bruins’ momentum. Defenseman Mason Lohrei ran his stick up too high on the Panthers’ Steven Lorentz, and gave him a fat lip. So, referee Dan O’Rourke did his dental exam and slapped Lohrei with a four-minute penalty.
Less than four minutes later, the game was effectively out of reach.
That devastating sequence in the second period of the Bruins’ Game 3 loss to the Panthers essentially decided things. The B’s were able to pick it back up for much of the third period, at one point cutting the Panthers’ lead from four down to two, but it was too little, too late.
