Boston Bruins' Depleted Defense Returns to Reality in Loss to Minnesota Wild

The official scoresheet and play-by-play transcript pointed to a perfect balance of blame among the Boston Bruins’ blue-line brigade Tuesday night.

The Minnesota Wild spent the third period flip-flopping a 3-1 deficit into a 4-3 victory, all the while going on an 18-8 run in the shooting gallery. Amid that submissive slide, every Boston defensive pairing had a turn letting pucks and puck-carriers get by on its watch with costly results.

Dougie Hamilton and Dennis Seidenberg, the de facto minute-munching tandem as long as Zdeno Chara is out with his injury, could not curtail Zach Parise at the 4:21 mark. Minnesota’s leading producer thus maintained his perfect point-per-game pace through eight ventures in 2014-15.

Only two minutes and 13 seconds elapsed before Matt Bartkowski and Zach Trotman, the bottom pair as long as Kevan Miller is missing, let Justin Fontaine pull the Wild even.

Not to be excluded in the top-to-bottom, man-for-man debacle, Torey Krug and Adam McQuaid shared the demerit on the decider. They lost their bid for a one-night plus-one rating by being in action when Marco Scandella inserted Minnesota’s winning goal.

If the Bruins cannot acclimate to this indefinite, injury-induced makeup, they simply will have to get used to these scorchings at the hands of top-tier competition. Based on his prognosis, a four-to-six-week recovery period, their captain will not be in action again until at least the weekend of Nov. 21.

Under that best-case scenario, they will be missing Chara for such marquee matchups as Montreal on Nov. 13 and St. Louis Nov. 18.

In the tentative worst-case scenario, Chara will not return until at least a full week into December. That could entail working without his services for another Montreal Canadiens clash as well as dates with the Pittsburgh Penguins, Anaheim Ducks, Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks.

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There is even less certainty as to when Miller will be back in action. The latest refresher on his status, per a Monday afternoon blog post by Caryn Switaj on the team’s website, holds that he “remains out indefinitely with a dislocated right shoulder.”

On the Chara front, this means sticking with the top-four arrangement of Seidenberg, Hamilton, McQuaid and Krug. On the Miller front, it means indefinitely filling out the quorum with players that would otherwise constitute Boston’s spare defenseman and a Providence minute-muncher.

As Tuesday’s tumble reaffirmed, the Bruins cannot afford to have Bartkowski, Trotman and any other call-up resigning themselves to their ordinary caliber.

They might get away with that against lower-class NHL adversaries. But at 5-6-0 on the year, this team needs every player it enlists to help it snag every hard-earned point possible.

With a few favorable elements falling into place, the first full-length game with the current configuration all but functioned as a belated preseason tilt. The Bruins spent this past Saturday exploiting a plainly listless Toronto Maple Leafs team, 4-1.

Tuesday, on the other hand, marked Boston’s third encounter with a Western Conference team so far in 2014-15. The opponent in question had just ravaged two other Eastern tenants, underscoring the two circuits’ team-for-team discrepancy in quality.

The Wild were coming off seven- and four-goal outbursts against the Tampa Bay Lightning and New York Rangers respectively. Jason Zucker had supplied three of those goals, while the rest had come from eight other individuals, including seven forwards.

On top of that, they were inclined to bring an element of danger by looking for a quick energy conversion after Monday’s meltdown in Manhattan. Their four-goal outpouring that night gave way to a five-goal Ranger rally in the third period.

For a variety of explicable and inexplicable reasons, Boston’s current defensive sextet was not ready for that upgrade in competition. It was not ready to spend 60 minutes stifling an already deep, potent, battle-tested core with a fresh motivational sparkplug in its possession.

In turn, it generated the lowlights in a seesaw slip, shedding first blood early before spilling a 3-1 lead in the closing frame.

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In the fifth minute of Tuesday’s action, the icebreaking play began with a botched connection between Boston’s two bottom-tier blueliners. Trotman, clutching the puck in the near corner of his own end, thrust a backhand feed behind the cage to Bartkowski. But the pressured recipient could not let it latch to his blade.

Minnesota forechecker Thomas Vanek collected the disk and handed it over to Nino Niederreiter, who deposited a snap shot. That gave the visiting third-line left wing his second strike of the season.

Niederreiter, notably enough, was not among the nine Wild skaters who tuned the mesh in either of their two previous games. But based on the balance that their 7-2 romp over Tampa Bay and fall-from-ahead 5-4 falter to the Rangers signified, one had to think he was due.

One could say the same about Fontaine, who became Minnesota’s 13th different goal-scorer through eight games upon drawing a 3-3 knot.

The Bartkowski-Trotman tandem was again on duty for the drawback that evaporated Boston’s lead. That, more than anything, is where the long-term concern sits as long as Chara and Miller are both out of service.

Ask any hockey coach at any competitive level and you will hear the same basic emphasis on depth for any team that wants to contend. Ordinarily, the depth discussion is confined to offense, but it only takes logical instinct to understand that the concept equally applies to the blue-line brigade.

In order to one-up a fellow heavyweight, a team must equip itself with defensemen capable of offsetting the opponent’s lower lines. In their second straight outing as a regular NHL pairing, Bartkowski and Trotman did too little to instill confidence on that front.

Can they improve? Certainly, under the system of a conscious coach in his eighth year of a tenure highlighted by a Stanley Cup title and another appearance in the final. You can also add the fact that Bartkowski joined Dougie Hamilton, Torey Krug and Miller in growing through unexpected minutes for the better part of 2014-15.

But believing based on the past shall not suffice, especially with the team below .500 at the three-week mark of the regular season.

Bartkowski, Trotman and their colleagues must lasso this learning experience and validate Boston’s organizational depth all over again.

Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics for this report were found via NHL.com.