By: Jason Cooke | Follow me on X @cookejournalism
Just one spot in the National Hockey League standings separated the Boston Bruins from the Chicago Blackhawks ahead of Boston’s penultimate home game of their disheartening campaign on Causeway Street this season.
And the Bruins were surely reminded of it on Thursday night. After breaking a 10-game slide with two wins in their last three games, a Boston team yearning for a speedy retool looked awfully similar to a Blackhawks squad knees deep in a rebuild in a 5-2 defeat at TD Garden.
Boston, which entered Thursday in the basement of the Eastern Conference, was outplayed up and down the ice at the hands of a young Chicago squad that left the bowels of TD Garden with a 23-46-10 record after a win over the Bruins — another harsh reality check for a team in a vastly different position than what they anticipated last summer.
“It’s still a humbling league,” said interim head coach Joe Sacco. “It’s a good league regardless of where teams are in the standings. You have to be ready for 60 minutes.”
While the 5-2 final doesn’t look pretty for the Bruins, they certainly still bode to have a leg-up over Chicago in the near future with their current injury-depleted roster and crop of upcoming talent both in the NHL and in the pipeline. Until then, they stand eerily similar to a Blackhawks team that even phenom Connor Bedard couldn’t uplift into hockey elegance.
All was well for Boston in the first period, breaking the ice at 10:39 as David Pastrnak opened the scoring with his 42nd goal of the season amid a dominant tear that has yielded 14 points in his last five games ahead of Thursday’s contest. Morgan Geekie fed a short pass to Elias Lindholm in the slot, firing a shot that deflected off Pastrnak and past Arvid Soderblom.
The line combination has been unstoppable as of late for Boston as Geekie tallied his 31st goal of the season in the third period from Pastrnak to cut the Chicago lead to 4-2 at 11:08. Pastrnak said it has been a lot of fun to watch Geekie net a breakout season in Boston.
“Super, super happy,” Pastrnak said. “Well deserved. He works on his game and you could see it this year and really became a great goal scorer threat and makes really nice plays.”
The Bruins announced their 2024-25 awards prior to puck drop, and Geekie hauled in his fair share of hardware. He claimed the Eddie Shore Award and was recognized as the team’s Third Star along with Pastrnak (First Star) and Jeremy Swayman (Second Star).
“It’s awesome,” Geekie said of his recognition. “It’s something I can share with my family and something I’ll always look back on, especially an organization like this. It’s something special to always have.”
Boston’s shorthanded post-deadline roster is far from a finished product, leading to defensive breakdowns similar to the sequence that set the table for Nick Foligno’s tying score with 12:05 left in the middle frame. The ex-Bruin maneuvered around a lunging Mason Lohrei along the Boston blue line before escaping on a breakaway and beating Jeremy Swayman to knot the game at 1-1.
Lohrei, a promising defensive prospect on Boston’s backend, has had an up-and-down sophomore season that has shown the good and the ugly of a young player’s development in the NHL. But with the long-term loss of Hampus Lindholm and Charlie McAvoy, Lohrei has been called upon to headline a defensive core with Nikita Zadorov.
“There’s a lot of things this year in his development that have gone in the right direction I think,” Sacco said. “There’s also things that he has to continue to work on obviously. Being thrown into a situation where he’s playing more minutes right now as a young defenseman playing against top players consistently on a night-in and night-out basis, it’s not easy. It’s a tough ask.”
At full strength, the Bruins possess the defensive depth necessary to be a competitive team on a nightly basis in the NHL — a luxury Chicago isn’t afforded. The Blackhawks rolled six defensemen all under the age of 24 on Thursday in what is a major organizational hole within the team.
That didn’t matter on Thursday, as Foligno’s goal set the table for a trio of third-period tallies by Ryan Donato, Tyler Bertuzzi and Kevin Korchinski in a three-goal salvo to take a convincing lead. The flurry came in under two minutes, sucking the life out of the Garden before Foligno iced the game with 26 seconds left in the third with an empty netter.
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