Let’s start with the tiny morsel of good news about which the Bruins could boast after their 5-3 loss to the fleet, skilled Oilers Thursday night at the Garden:
1. They still have 71 games remaining on the 82-game regular-season schedule.
OK, so that about covers the good stuff.
Oh, and the fourth line of Anton Blidh, Tomas Nosek, and Curtis Lazar turned in an honest, efficient workmanlike night’s work. A sure sign of a bad night in the NHL is when the fourth line is the only legit source of praise.
If the Bruins are destined to fill up the schedule with lackluster offerings like Thursday night’s fetid faux pas on Causeway Street, in which they were outscored, 3-0, in the third period, the sons of Butch Cassidy could be on the outside looking in come playoff time for the first time since he took over their bench in Feb. 2017.
Sure, it’s early. Yes, the boatload of boo-boos, especially in their defensive end, should be correctable.
But the first month of the season has shown the Bruins too often to be scrambly, even disconnected, in their own end of the ice, spotty in net, and still very much in need of finding a line beyond the No. 1 trio of Patrice Bergeron and company that can be a consistent offensive threat.
All of which is to say it was a bad night against the Oilers, a slick squad that has the ability to make other teams look bad. But the truth is that wasn’t the case this time. The Bruins didn’t cave under the pressure of the kind of ferocious, prolific Oiler attack we saw back in the days of Gretzky, Kurri, Messier, and Anderson.
Instead, the Bruins mainly were victims of their own soft, error-filled play, especially in their own end, where they consistently handled pucks as if they were handling packages at the end of a 14-hour shift at the Amazon warehouse on Christmas week. Whoops! No one’s going to put that one under the tree.
“There’s a lot that goes into beating yourselves,” said Cassidy, as disconsolate after the loss as at any time during his tenure here. “Some of it is the respect for the game of freakin’ hockey, right? Like who you’re playing against, how to play the right way. That’s on us to get the message across: You’ve got to respect the game, play the right way, play the way you need to have success.”
That was definitely not Game No. 11 on 11-11-21, a night when the Bruins all but published the “Hockey Handbook on How to Beat Yourself.”
They frittered away 1-0 and 2-1 leads in record time, the Oilers scoring the 1-1 equalizer only 44 seconds after a David Pastrnak strike, then needing only 24 seconds to make it 2-2 after Brad Marchand’s goal.
Then came the parade of horribles in the third when the Bruins gifted Leon Draisaitl a pair of goals (like he needed two more) with giant boo-boos only 3:04 apart. The second one proved to be the game-winner, but wait, there’s more, yet another lapse in the back end that allowed Cody Ceci to walk in and pot the 5-3 closer.
Brandon Carlo, looking to make a D-to-D pass to partner Matt Grzelcyk, coughed up the 3-3 equalizer. His muffed pass went directly to Draisaitl for the gimme putt against Linus Ullmark.
“One of those nights, the third period…,” said a sullen Carlo, briefly a hero when he fired home the 3-2 lead in the second period, “… one of the worst ones I’ve had in my NHL career. Overall, gotta take it and learn from it.”
On the game-winner, Ceci was instrumental, charging down the right wall, with Jake DeBrusk all but using a curling broom to dust off the ice for his path down the wing. Unfettered, Ceci chugged along and centered to the front for the sharp-eyed Draisaitl to pot his 12th of the season. For Draisaitl, the Garden looked as giving as Fenway’s left field wall.
A franchise staple here for decades has been for the Bruins to fashion the Garden into a hurt locker, make opposing teams pay a price for everything, especially scoring goals. Win every game? Of course not. But at least make the visitors sweat for the 2 points. The Oilers barely perspired.
Long gone, of course, are the days when such embarrassing displays would have prompted a fight as a means of trying to change the chemistry, for the Bruins to recapture their own attention. No one does that anymore. But amid the meltdown, the Bruins also didn’t land a big hit. They didn’t respond with a statement shift of, say, speed and net front presence.
They just kept giving and giving and the Oilers kept taking and taking. Not your grandad’s Bruins, and frankly, not the new age Bruins we’ve seen here since Cassidy became bench boss. With two weeks to go leading to Thanksgiving, they now need to come up with something quickly to shimmy their way up the standings.
History has shown clubs out of the playoff hunt by Thanksgiving only chase the leaders for the remainder of the season and often miss the cut.
“I’ve got to do a better job,” mused a frustrated Cassidy. “Obviously, the mistakes we made, line changes (Marchand miscue on the 1-1 equalizer) puck management . . . a team beats itself, that’s on us.”
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.
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