Bruins head coach Marco Sturm calls out ‘mindset’ after loss in Vegas

Bruins head coach Marco Sturm was not overly interested in moral victories following Thursday's loss to the Golden Knights.

Sure, the Bruins battled back for the second game in a row, and with the game still in the balance with an offensive-zone draw with eight seconds remaining in the game for the second game in a row. And, yeah, that's an undeniably more talented team than the Bruins on the other bench. But even in his first stint behind an NHL bench as a head coach, Sturm knows that moral victories are the only kinds of wins his team will have to celebrate this season (and especially against high-quality teams) if they don't buy into the identity he's trying to forge with his squad.

“For me, it’s a mindset going in," a frustrated Sturm said following the defeat. "Do you want to play a 1-0 game or do you want to play that open game? We’ve done it now two or three games in a row. We got lucky once because of goaltending, but other than that, that’s not us. That’s not us. I don’t want to play that game. I’m a defensive mindset coach, I would say, and it starts from there.” 

After what was their leakiest performance of the season on Monday afternoon against the Lightning, things got worse for the Bruins in Vegas on Thursday night.

In addition to the leaks that the club found themselves unable to patch up, the Bruins opened the freeway up to the high-octane and rush-loving Knights, and took enough penalties to make Sturm chew through an entire bucket of gum. Good for Super Bubble's business, sure, but bad for the Black and Gold.

“We knew it was going to be tough here [and] we just gotta be smarter than that," Sturm noted. "We still have a lot of really good players in our lineup. But that’s not our standard. We just gotta be way better. We have to buy in on our defensive effort, and that was just not the case today."

The Bruins are not built for run-and-gun hockey. They're also not built to chase the game the way they had to on Monday and again on Thursday. They've stressed that from Day 1, and reinforced that last week when Cam Neely outright admitted that they focused on having more 'P&V' in their lineup when desperately-needed offensive reinforcements proved too difficult or impossible to acquire.

But with all of that said, what has to be driving Sturm insane right now is the fact that the Bruins are scoring more than anybody could've anticipated. In fact, they have a top-10 offense in the NHL, averaging over three and a half goals per game. But over the last two games, those goals have come for the Black and Gold as a 'chasing' team when games are slipping out of hand due to their shortcomings at the other end of the rink. And without the jam that Sturm demands.

"It’s a grinding game [and] it’s not pretty," Sturm, whose team is now 3-2-0 on the season, said. "We have to understand that, and a lot of guys didn’t.” 

Here are some other takeaways, thoughts, and notes from a 6-5 loss to the Golden Knights out in Las Vegas...

If you decided to go to bed instead of staying up and watching this one, you'll probably wake up, check the box score, and see Jeremy Swayman's 31-of-37 line and think this was one of those clunkers that were all too common a year ago.

It was not. In fact, Swayman may have been one of the biggest (or perhaps only) reasons why the Knights were unable to pot 10 in this contest.

“Well, the positive was I think Swayman was really good tonight," Sturm told NESN's Andy Brickley after the loss. "We let him hang for a long time there."

And the Bruins' best agreed with that assessment.

“Sway was standing on his head," David Pastrnak said. "We let him stand on his head the whole game. Can’t happen. We have to be better as a team.” 

“Sway; that was what worked," Charlie McAvoy echoed. "They got a ton of chances. They got a ton of looks and Sway bent but didn’t break.” 

There was also some downright rotten luck (and even worse support in front of No. 1) on the stops that Swayman was unable to make in this loss, too.

On the first Golden Knight goal of the night, Jordan Harris tried to activate into the offensive zone, which left a flat-footed and backwards-skating Viktor Arvidsson as the Bruins' last line of defense against leading NHL goal scorer Pavel Dorofeyev. Bad idea. The VGK's third goal, meanwhile, was a knuckleball shot from Jack Eichel that deflected off Morgan Geekie's stick and then fluttered down into the Boston net at the last moment. The Bruins then completely forgot about Dorofeyev (did I mention he's leading the NHL in goals?) on a power-play chance that ended with a pop-up down in Swayman's crease and in the net. Vegas then baited the Bruins into a shorthanded goal that led to a 2-on-1 and then a second-chance look on said 2-on-1 (inexcusable) for their fifth goal. If that wasn't bad enough, the Bruins then unsuccessfully tried to implement the zero-human defense on the Golden Knights' sixth and final goal of the night, with William Karlsson having a clear lane to the net from his blue line to Swayman's blue paint.

It was a downright gross performance from Swayman's support staff.

“Just easy breakdowns, easy mistakes, easy mistakes on the reads, too," Sturm said postgame. "Not just from our young guys, but from our top guys, too."

If you're looking for a positive to take from this loss, it's absolutely the play of Boston's bottom-six forward grouping. They actually carried the team in this one, believe it or not. Bottom-six forwards scored three of the B's five goals in the losing effort, and the fourth line was on the ice and screened the Vegas netminder on the Nikita Zadorov goal late in the first period of play.

“Why was it the best line? They did their job and they played in their end the whole time because they went behind them and they worked," Sturm said. "That’s what we talked about before the game. But we only had one line.

"And that was the problem.” 

Bottom-six production is always a delicate balance for any team. But especially for one as top-heavy as the Bruins. Your bottom-six forwards factoring in on four of your five goals is almost always going to be a positive, but not if it means you're getting zilch out of the top two lines. That was the case for Boston on Thursday, with second-line forwards Viktor Arvidsson (10:27) and Casey Mittelstadt (11:21) falling out of the rotation in the third period and finishing the game with less time on ice than every member of Boston's fourth line.

- If the first two games of his season told us anything, it's that Bruins defenseman Jordan Harris is a good change of pace option for the club. He plays with pace and has some good offensive instincts, which can be weaponized heavily on home ice with the benefit of last change. But if his third game taught us anything, it's that the Bruins really need to get Hampus Lindholm back in action. We should all know better than to put Thursday's struggles on Harris, but there's a domino effect here, and if you can only play a defenseman 13 and a half minutes (like the Bruins did with Harris in this game) for one reason or another, you're going to overtax the rest of your roster and it's going to lead to problems in a truncated schedule like this. There's really no reason for Charlie McAvoy to be playing over 27 minutes in the fifth game of the season, and with a back-to-back on deck for the weekend.

- Like Sturm, I can't get on board with the moral victories here. This was a winnable game. Even beyond the obvious statement of scoring five goals needs to be a win every single time the Bruins (a team that's open about their scoring issues and their need to be a defensively tight team) put forth that kind of effort this season. That's the second straight winnable game this team dropped, or at the very least failed to squeak a loser point out of. Those hurt.

- Insanely early, I know, but if healthy, it's really tough for me to see any team in the NHL beating Vegas four times in seven games this spring. They have weapons for days, and are equipped to dominate in any situation. Even strength, power play, hell, even the penalty kill. Just an insanely talented roster.