Boston Bruins fall to the Chicago Blackhawks in a messy, dirty, question-provoking game
Neither the Boston Bruins nor the Chicago Blackhawks probably felt very good about Thursday night’s game, where the Bruins took home their sixth one-goal loss in a 3-2 final decision.
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I’ll start with some of the upsides. The Bruins are finally starting to show some signs of life; after going on a four-game Western Conference road trip that saw a team struggling to score and struggling even more to win at all, the reigning President’s Trophy winners were starting to look like the All-Star roster that they are.
For Chicago, Scott Darling has been coming through in the absence of Corey Crawford (foot); he stopped 32 of the 34 shots he was presented with over the sixty-minute game.
Both teams left the game last night, though, with a sour taste in their mouths.
The Bruins and the Blackhawks were each the deliverers of a questionable offense; both Milan Lucic and Andrew Shaw were the unsurprising repeat offenders that hit just a little bit too hard and at the kind of wrong moments. Shaw earned a fighting major in the third after knocking Lucic into the boards late on Lucic’s assist to Torey Krug, when he chose to fight Bruins forward Chris Kelly.
The biggest moment in the game, though, happened in the second period.
As an observer who prefers a more physical hockey game, I saw no supplemental discipline-necessary fault with defenseman Dennis Seidenberg‘s hit on Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews, but there’s no question it was a hard hit. So hard, in fact, that Toews appeared somewhat unwell… yet was put back in the game by Chicago’s head coach Joel Quenneville, who insisted after the game that he had ‘seemed fine’.
Spoiler alert: he wasn’t, and left the game shortly after taking the ice again in those middle twenty minutes.
The lack of precaution on Chicago’s part supports the accusations around the league that coaches favor toughness over safety, but Bruins head coach Claude Julien’s post-game remarks that sort of brushed off the risk of concussion were equally concerning. Social media became a mess of those who fully comprehend the severity of a concussion and those who, whether due to lack of information about head injuries or refusal to consider a non-visible injury a real threat, believe the ability to go back into the game is up to the player.
Seidenberg was given a boarding call over the hit; hopefully, Toews makes a full and speedy recovery.
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