BEDFORD, Mass. -- Pat Maroon was not going to make excuses.
The Boston Bruins, he said, have not played well enough. That’s why they’re down 3-1 in the best-of-7 Eastern Conference Second Round to the Florida Panthers.
Not the calls by the officials. Not the hit by Sam Bennett on Brad Marchand in Game 3.
“Listen, we can sit here and point the finger,” the forward said Monday before the Bruins traveled to Florida, one day after a 3-2 loss in Game 4 at TD Garden. “Fortunately, that’s not what we’re going to do today. We had a 2-0 lead. We didn’t give ourselves an opportunity and we didn’t play good.
“You’ve just got to take it like that -- we haven’t been playing good. Unfortunately, that’s not good enough right now. We can’t sit there and make excuses on who’s to blame. It’s the 25 guys in our locker room right now, and we’ve got to figure it out.”
The Bruins need a win to stave off elimination in Game 5 at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Florida, on Tuesday (7 p.m. ET; ESPN, SNO, SNE, TVAS, CBC). They may have Marchand, their captain, back after the forward skated Monday. Marchand, who missed Game 4 with an upper-body injury believed to be sustained on the hit by Bennett, made the trip to Florida.
With or without Marchand, there is one goal.
“We just have to go down and win a hockey game,” general manager Don Sweeney said. “Go out, execute the way we’re capable of, and we’ll be fine.”
However, to do that, they have to play more like they did in the first period of Game 4 than they did the final two periods, when they allowed the Panthers back into a game they led by two goals early, scored on their first five shots of the game.
“We’ve got to push,” said Maroon, a three-time Stanley Cup winner (Tampa Bay Lightning, 2020, 2021; St. Louis Blues, 2019). “When we had the lead, we’ve got to keep pushing. We’re not pushing right now. When we have the lead, we’re sitting back on our heels, we’re letting them dictate the play. We’ve got to start dictating the play more. We’ve got to start coming out with a little more fire each period.”
Part of the problem has been the Bruins have not gotten enough shots on Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky. Boston had 15 in Game 2, 17 in Game 3 and 18 in Game 4, all losses.
“We’re not a volume-shooting team,” Sweeney said. “We’re trying to get quality. In a perfect world, you get both quality and quantity.”
But they need more of them. When asked if they were getting enough shots on goal Sunday, center Charlie Coyle said, “No.”
“We’re still not putting pucks enough to the net,” Maroon said the next day. “Eighteen shots on a goalie throughout three periods is not good enough.”
In Game 4, the Panthers had 14 high-danger shots to the Bruins’ six. It’s not enough. It’s not enough shots. It’s not enough rebounds.
Charlie McAvoy, for instance, has been held without a shot on goal by Florida in the series. Sweeney said Monday the defenseman is healthy and admitted he hasn’t “found his groove” offensively. McAvoy does not have a point against the Panthers; he had four assists in seven games against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round.
“We’re not shooting enough from the top and I don’t think we’re getting enough traffic,” Maroon said. “I think we’ve got to find those second and third opportunities where we’re creating havoc and then we’re jumping on loose pucks if it goes to the corner. We’ve got to throw more pucks to the net. We’ve got to take more pucks to the net when we have that opportunity. We’re not doing it.
“When they eventually have [41] shots on net to our 18, sometimes you can sneak away with a win. But they’ve been doing it the last four games. We need more volume. We need more shots. We need to be more predictable, just kind of get back to the basics.”
That means, to him, in on the forecheck, pucks high-to-low, pucks to the net, creating second and third opportunities, get the rebounds. Shot volume.
“Get them a little under stress. We haven’t done that in the [offensive] zone,” Maroon said.
It’s not just the shots, though. It’s everything else too.
“It’s the little details in the game right now,” Maroon said. “It’s turnovers. It’s maybe not getting pucks out on the PK. It’s they scored their third goal off an [offensive] zone face-off. We’ve got to figure out what we need to do. We need to be better. That’s the bottom line.”
Maroon said Boston would be focusing on Game 5 as Game 1, a single game it needs to win. It would be focusing not on outcome, but on process. It’s the only way forward.
After all, they’ve seen it before, as recently as two weeks ago. As Maroon and Sweeney pointed out, the Maple Leafs came back to win Games 5 and 6 in the first round after being down 3-1. The Bruins eventually won Game 7, but there is life after a 3-1 deficit.
They’re not done yet.
“The beauty of this [is] we have another game,” Maroon said. “We have an opportunity to fix our mistakes. And it’s not big ones, it’s just little ones.
“We’ve got to find a way to be better. … We’ve played well against them. I just think we need a little more.”
