Bruins take 7-1 beating from Carolina

The Bruins have played enough good hockey over the first two weeks of 2022 to reasonably believe what happened on Tuesday night at the Garden was an aberration.

They better hope it is.

After the feel-good event of Willie O’Ree’s number retirement ceremony, the B’s killed the vibe by playing a simply awful first period against the Carolina Hurricanes en route to a well-earned 7-1 beating.

It was not even as close as that lopsided score indicated.

Was this just one of those nights that every team experiences over the course of an 82-game schedule, or the start of a backslide? We’ll have a better idea of that when the B’s get back at it Thursday hosting Washington.

But it wasn’t a great sign that the thumping came in a measuring-stick kind of game against the Canes, who shut the B’s out back in October.

The only team that mattered in coach Bruce Cassidy’s assessments, however, was his own.

“It’s problematic against anybody, to be honest with you,” said Cassidy. “It’s Game 36, so a measuring stick? I don’t know. We’re building our game. We’ve been playing well, better lately, much better than the start of the year. Not tonight obviously. We had nothing. They were clearly better than us in every area, so this is less about the opponent, more about where we’re at. Obviously they forecheck hard, they do some of the things top teams do well, they’re hard on pucks, they get on top of you, get to the front of the net. We weren’t nearly good enough. And we wouldn’t have been good enough against the worst team in the league. We just weren’t competitive, and we paid the price.”

Patrice Bergeron, who was all for “burning the tape” on this one, had no explanation for the performance.

“It was very disappointing the way we played, the way we showed up, the way we started the game,” said Bergeron, who had the only Bruin goal. “We were very flat and it stayed flat the whole game.”

One of the hallmarks of the B’s recent surge was the emergence of their bottom six, but in the first period the B’s third line was on the ice for three goals against and the fourth line was on for two as the B’s lost their checks all over the ice and the Canes ran out to a stunning 5-1 lead in the first 20 minutes for an early knockout punch.

It was easily the B’s worst period of the year.

Teuvo Teravainen got the Canes on the board first at 3:44 when, after Tuukka Rask stopped a 2-on-1 offering, he converted a Jaccob Slavin pass. At 6:03, Jesperi Kotkaniemi scored his first of two goals when he was left all alone in front of the net to put back a big Rask rebound.

It looked like the B’s might get their legs under them when Bergeron scored on a deflection for a power-play goal at 11:13 — snapping a streak of 35 straight penalties killed by Carolina.

But it did not take long to learn that this would not be the B’s night. Just 13 seconds later, Kotkaniemi deflected home a Slavin shot and the Canes had their two-goal bulge back with the B’s fourth line and defense pairing of Brandon Carlo and Urho Vaakanainen on the ice.

“That was a big letdown for us, guys who are used to being relied to keep the puck out of the net, the bottom of the lineup and some of the D that are relied on. They just didn’t get it done tonight, for whatever reason. We’ll move on,” said Cassidy.

Seth Jarvis and Derek Stepan scored 56 seconds apart and the rout was on. Charlie Coyle and Oskar Steen were both minus-3 while eight other players finished the period with a minus-2. Rask, playing in his second game after returning from offseason hip surgery, finished out the rest of the period but that would be it for him. Final line for him, five goals on 12 shots. Linus Ullmark replaced him to start the second period.

“It would have been one of those nights where we would have needed an unbelievable effort from (Rask) to get any points at all, and that’s an unfair ask,” said Cassidy.

The Canes invited the B’s back in the game in the second period when they took three penalties, the last two of which gave the Bruins 68 seconds of a 5-on-3, but the B’s could not do any more damage on goalie Frederik Andersen.

Any hope of a comeback already out the window, Slavin and Andrei Svechnikov added power-play goals in the third to complete the embarrassment.

For Rask at least, the game was already in the rearview mirror.

“It’s gone already,” said Rask. “One thing you learn over the years, you’re never as bad or as good as you think, so you want to keep it even-keeled and trust the process. That’s what we have to do as a team and I have to do as an individual.”