Boston Bruins Burned by Early Power-Play Outage, Failure to Keep Luongo Down

Once they are out of Roberto Luongo’s head, as the Boston Bruins clearly are now, will there be any getting back in?

Perhaps there will not need to be, provided counterpart Tim Thomas equates his effort in Friday night’s 1-0 loss in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Maybe next time, he can even afford to blink once in the goaltending staring contest, even if he couldn’t on Friday.

But at this rate, Thomas is the very last of potential goat candidates should the Bruins concede the Cup on either Monday or Wednesday. After all, he is also the team’s runaway candidate for the Conn Smythe Trophy in the event he and his mates resurge.

Nope. For the first time in its unlikely run of little or no consequence, Boston’s arid power play has a chance to force feed a long-lasting taste of vinegar to all those who swear by the Spoked-B. The topmost reason the Bruins are now facing elimination is because they whiffed on four unanswered 5-on-4 invitations within the first 26 minutes and 18 seconds of play Friday.

Coupled with that, Game 5 would have been the most serendipitous time to keep up the even less likely trend that has seen Boston edge out Vancouver in the way of special teams in this series.

Luongo was on the heels of authorizing 12 goals in four-plus periods, being rightly forked out with 16:21 on the clock in Game 4 and having less than 48 hours to fly back home and recover. What better way to keep the trend going than to lure the Canucks into penalty trouble and build upon those three power-play strikes from earlier in the series?

Likewise, what better way to embolden one’s own spirits than to grab a fourth conversion, which would be the most the Bruins have accumulated in any series thus far in this tournament?

As it happened, Boston mustered two shots over its first man-up segment, via Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, from around the dirty-nose area on Luongo’s porch. Rich Peverley notched another one right as Raffi Torres’ sentence expired with a mere 3:39 gone in the first period.

Less than four minutes later, with Henrik Sedin caged for interference, Bergeron and Krejci both whiffed again, with only Bergeron’s attempt being played by Luongo. After that, the next skater to discharge a puck was Sedin himself, nine seconds after his jailbreak.

Bergeron was denied from in front twice more when Andrew Alberts did time for a roughing infraction cited at 14:14 of the opening frame. Three of the alternate captain’s first four power-play stabs were from within an intimate 15 feet, while the other was a slapper from 30 feet.

And he took yet another one early in the second, this one from a more-distant 45 feet at 5:19. Zdeno Chara unleashed an even longer-range wrister later on the same attack.

On the one hand, it is not as if the Bruins (or at least Bergeron) did not do enough to test Luongo’s fragile spirit. On the other hand, they clearly did not reap enough to keep that spirit―or even return it―to shards when the chances were at their ripest.

Textbook double-whammy.

And the longer the aforementioned rhetorical questions went unanswered, the more Bruins buffs had to reopen the power-play crisis barstool discussion and wonder when the other skate is finally going to drop. They were prompted to wonder, once more, when this subpar showing on the more glamorous side of the special teams’ spectrum would cancel a summer’s date with Lord Stanley.

When Maxim Lapierre smuggled the game’s only goal off of Thomas’ shoulder with 15:25 to spare in the third, that skate was at least nudged off the skyscraper. It shall remain suspended in the air until at least Monday’s contest back at TD Garden.

Maybe a perilous power-play performance in Game 6 will not be required to abort that skate’s freefall. Maybe another injection of self-doubt into Luongo’s soul will not be, either.

But if nothing at all is done to avert defeat, the Bruins’ failure to muster those two winning elements in the first half of Game 5 will jut out, clamoring for blame.