Boston Bruins go down to Colorado Avalanche

So maybe spotting the opposition a three-goal lead isn’t a recipe for success.
A night after coming back from a three-goal deficit to salvage what felt like a very good point in Washington, the Bruins were just as hospitable to the Colorado Avalanche.
But this time the Bs would only have a loss to the NHL’s worst team to show for it. David Pastrnak reaffirmed his status as a special player with two terrific goals, but that was all the Bs could muster as they had their six-game point streak snapped with a 4-2 loss to the Avs.
The Avalanche, who were waiting in Boston while the Bs played in Washington on Wednesday, halted an 0-5-1 skid. A slow start is expected on the second of back-to-back games, but it doesn’t excuse the wounds the Bs inflicted on themselves early on.
“Until you can find your legs you’ve got to be smart, and we weren’t,” said coach Claude Julien. “We gave up some soft goals and dug ourselves a hole that was certainly hard to come back from tonight. They looked like a well-rested team, they had a lot of energy. They’re a team that hadn’t won in a while and you could tell that they were tired of losing. They came out ready to play tonight.”
Goalie Anton Khudobin (four goals on 22 shots) was not sharp, nor was the Bs’ struggling power play. The Bs were 0-for-2 on the man advantage and allowed a shorthanded goal that put them firmly in chase mode for the night. The Avs got on the board in a 4-on-4 situation when Matt Duchene was given time and space to walk through the slot and beat Khudobin to the glove side.
The game was still manageable when Fedor Tyutin was called for slashing at 12:57 to give the Bs their second power play. The first unit has not scored now in six games and the desperation was showing, but it did not manifest itself in a good way. Torey Krug dove to keep a puck in at the blue line, which he did. The only problem was that he slid past the puck, leaving it on a tee for a Nathan MacKinnon breakaway goal.
“I thought they were tired and if I could keep it in, we could keep them hemmed in and keep them running around,” said Krug. “At the end of the day it’s a 50-50 play.... I probably won’t do that anymore. Sometimes you’ve got to go through those things to learn.
“It was one of those things I thought instinctively I could get there and keep them hemmed in. You could even tell, when he went in on the breakaway he was tired. If I keep that in, hopefully we get a couple chances. But we’ve got to be better. It’s some of our better players on our team and we’ve got to take the onus on ourselves to start capitalizing on our opportunities and changing the game for our team.”
Following the script from the previous night, the Bs then allowed a bad goal early in the second. Brandon Carlo was simply trying to get the puck deep outside the offensive blue line, but he hammered it into John Mitchell’s shin pads, and the Colorado forward took off on an odd-man rush. Khudobin lost his angle and gave up a bad shortside goal to make it 3-0.
It looked like the Bs might come back from this deficit, too, when Pastrnak unleashed his own brand of lightning with two goals in 1:20. First, he scored after stepping out of the penalty box and taking a great indirect pass from Tim Schaller off the boards. He put a move on goalie Calvin Pickard, who made a strong initial save, but Pastrnak stayed right on top of the play to put home the rebound.
Then off a faceoff win, Brad Marchand found him in the high slot, from where Pastrnak lasered a one-timer past Pickard for his league-leading 18th goal.
But after the Bs put on some pressure to get the equalizer, the Avs ended the B’s momentum two seconds after a Kevan Miller penalty was up. Khudobin stopped a Francois Beauchemin shot, but the rebound went to Mikhail Grigorenko, who deftly fed Carl Soderberg for a nice backdoor goal.
That was the killer. The Bs had some chances in the third, but the Avs seemed determined to end their streak as they threw their bodies in front of pucks to snuff out scoring chances — and the Bs point streak. “Definitely, we have to get better,” said Pastrnak. “The last two games we kind of slept in the first period and those games can happen, obviously, but we have to learn from them. It can’t happen again.”