The Bruins showed up in Las Vegas to kick off their five-game road trip with plenty of desire to play hard and take it to the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday.
They just don’t have the ability to do so.
The B’s were already looking up at the Knights when the two teams met at the Garden on February (a crushing 4-3 loss for the B’s). Now that they’ve hollowed out their roster, the B’s simply have little chance to hang with the Knights, a true Stanley Cup contender, and they suffered a 5-1 loss at T-Mobile Arena.
The B’s were outshot 30-19 and, in their last three games, they have managed a total of 51 shots on net.
The Bruins had brought up Fabian Lysell and Michael Callahan for the trip, but interim coach Joe Sacco went with the same lineup that has been in place since the trade deadline. And the players who stayed in seemed grateful for it with the way they played in the early going.
The B’s started reasonably well in the scoreless first period and had a couple of decent chances on the only power play of the period, thanks to a bad tripping call on Mark Stone (John Beecher had simply fallen ahead of Stone’s check).
But the Knights eventually started to take control of the play and the B’s needed Jeremy Swayman to be good. He first made a nifty pad save on a Stone backhander shortly after the Knight came out of the box. His best save came on a backdoor play that had Reilly Smith shaking his head.
Vegas held an 11-7 shot advantage.
The second period, with the long change, has been problematic for the B’s, lowlighted by the embarrassing second period against the Lightning last Saturday in which they were outshot 21-0.
But they came out strong in the second on Thursday and had two great chances to take the lead on which they did not capitalize.
First, David Pastrnak set up Morgan Geekie for a one-timer but, with much of the net at which to shoot, Geekie clanged the near post.
Then the B’s had a 3-on-1 but Adin Hill stopped Marat Khusnutdinov’s initial shot and his follow-up.
The B’s started to spend too much time in their own end it it caught up to them.
When Nikita Zadorov took his 35th minor penalty of the season, second to only Brady Tkachuk, the Knights’ potent power play cashed in, with Pavel Dorofeyev beating Swayman with a shortside snipe at 9:19.
The Knights were gaining steam. The B’s survived another Vegas power play but, just when it looked like the B’s might get to the third down by a single goal, the Knights struck again for yet another goal against in the final minute of the period.
Off a Boston zone faceoff, Brandon Saad fed Dorofeyev for another wrist shot goal form the slot with 50 seconds left in the second, Dorofeyev’s 29th of the season. Predictably, that was a killer goal.
Though the B’s started well in the period, they managed just four shots on net in the second.
As they’d done the in the first two periods, the B’s came out with jump at the start of the third but, when their desperation got the best of them. Zadorov took a shot that never made it to Hill and he went in deep to follow it up but he never got there. Vegas turned it around for a 3-on-1. Brett Howden kept it for himself and beat Swayman at 5:47.
Dorofeyev finished off the hat trick at 10:22 when Swayman couldn’t hang on to a deflected puck and he scored on an easy backhander to make it 4-0.
It might as well have been 10-0.
Ivan Barbashev and Moran Geekie (24) traded a garbage time goals.