Bruins try to pick up pieces after brutal Game 1 loss in Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- There is no denying that the Bruins blew a great chance to seize the home-ice advantage away from the Buffalo Sabres on Sunday night. Considering how much better the B's have been at TD Garden than elsewhere, that's no small thing. But the Game 1 debacle, as painful as it was for Boston fans, is in the past.

The truth of the matter is that the B's can still accomplish their mission for this two-game segment of the best-of-seven series if they can finish a game like the one they started on Sunday. Coach Marco Sturm, meeting reporters on Monday, did not want his players to lose sight of the fact that they did some good things. The best thing the Bruins did was to pretty much take away one of the Sabres' best attributes, which was their rush offense and gaining speed through the neutral zone. In that sense, Sturm did not want to deviate much from what they did on Sunday for Tuesday's Game 2 at KeyBank Center.

"These guys (the Sabres), because of their quality and skill, they will have more time than us in the zone, most likely. But the question is, can we limit that?" said Sturm. "Part of it is our puck management, just to be smart about it. As long as we stick with the game plan that we have and the game we're suppose to play, I do like our chances and the chances were pretty damn good after 50 minutes.

"There's a lot of good things that happened. Unfortunately, it didn't happen (in the end). But we still feel really good. It's one game.

We've got to win one game at one point here in Buffalo and we'll try to do our best (Tuesday)." To play as well as the Bruins did in the neutral zone came at the expense of getting their own forechecking game going and doing to the Sabres what the Sabres eventually did to them, which was to win the war of attrition and creating turnovers that eventually won them the game. The Sabres took the chest-thumping contest, outhitting the Bruins 53-38. Hits can be a deceptive stat. When a team wins that category, it often means it was chasing the puck all night.

That wasn't the case on Sunday, when the Sabres had the puck far more and outshot the Bruins 38-20 with shots on net and 70-46 in total shots. Sabres coach Lindy Ruff even got in a subtle dig after the game, saying he thought his team wore down Boston physically, something Sturm felt was going to be a Bruins strength. Still, the Bruins don't want to abandon what they've done in the neutral zone. "It's obviously a balance, right?

How can we be on the forecheck and be aggressive but also be responsible, be above their players?" said Sean Kuraly. "Their D love to skate so I think it's about getting bumps on their D and making it hard to get up ice. They want to skate, so how can we make them stop, slow them down and stay above them? But it's a balance.

It's about going forward but also being responsible on the D side. There's nuances to that. But we looked at it this morning and I think we have a good idea of what that balance looks like." Boston defensemen coughed up the puck on all three goals that turned a 2-0 lead into a 3-2 deficit. Charlie McAvoy turned the puck over on Tage Thompson's first goal, the wraparound.

Andrew Peeke got bumped off the puck behind the net by Alex Tuch on Thompson's second goal. And finally, Hampus Lindholm's stick broke when he tried to rim the puck out, eventually turning into Mattias Samuelsson's goal that gave the Sabres control of the game. All that happened within a span of 4:34. The line that had been the Bruins' best two-way unit all year -- the Casey Mittelstadt-Pavel Zacha-Viktor Arvidsson line -- was on the ice for two of the first three goals and then Tuch's empty-netter, which wound up being the game-winner.

"They can be better. They really can," said Sturm pointedly. "They were just OK but I know they have another gear, like they've been all year. I think that's one line that needs to get better." Sturm gave kudos to the fourth line of Kuraly, Tanner Jeannot and Mark Kastelic, both for their 5-on-5 work and on the penalty kill, which went 4-for-4 against the Sabres.

"At the end of the day, they did their job," said Sturm. He was also very pleased with his most inexperienced line, the James Hagens-Fraser Minten-Marat Khusnutdinov unit. In fact, the coach put that line on the ice after the first two goals were scored because of how they played all night. "They were our best defensive line, I thought," said Sturm.

"They were rarely in trouble and played really solid. Can we get a little bit of offense down the stretch? Yeah, we're hoping so. But defensively, they were the most reliable line out there." Game 2 is Tuesday night at 7:30.

We'll get a better idea of whether Game 1 was a fatal squander or just a bad blip.