Bruins say 6-game losing streak 'is just embarrassing'

BOSTON -- There was no question how the Boston Bruins felt after their 7-5 loss to the Anaheim Ducks at TD Garden on Thursday.

“It’s just embarrassing, to the fans, to everybody,” forward Morgan Geekie said. “It’s just poor. Everything is poor.”

“It’s embarrassing,” defenseman Nikita Zadorov said. “It’s not how we want to play and how we should play, giving up so many goals every night, expecting to win the hockey game.”

“I’m embarrassed,” goalie Joonas Korpisalo said. “We all should be.”

“We’re all embarrassed, including me,” coach Marco Sturm said. “It’s definitely not the way we want to present ourselves, especially at home, too.”

The loss was their sixth straight, a devasting run for a team that started the season by winning its first three games and hoped to prove all who doubted it wrong. Instead, the Bruins are watching their season slip through their fingers already.

But it’s not as if the Bruins aren’t in these games. They are. Other than a 4-1 loss at the Colorado Avalanche on Oct. 18, the Bruins have been in every game. Four were one-goal losses, and the Ducks scored an empty-net goal to win by two.

Yet Boston is finding ways to lose, again and again and again.

“This is devastating the way we’re losing these games,” defenseman Charlie McAvoy said. “It’s just, it’s killing us. We’re fighting so hard and we just can’t stop beating ourselves. It’s pretty defeating right now.”

The one thing the Bruins can say about their team is that it has fight. Starting with the first loss during this stretch, a 4-3 defeat at the hands of the Tampa Bay Lightning on Oct. 13, the Bruins have fought back repeatedly only to give up the lead in the end. Against the Lightning, for instance, they cut a three-goal deficit to one but couldn’t finish the job.

The other games have been even more of a punch to the gut.

In a 4-3 loss to the Florida Panthers on Tuesday, which featured Brad Marchand’s return to TD Garden, the Bruins scored three times in the third period, including tying the game on a goal from Geekie with 1:31 remaining. However, they couldn’t hold on, allowing Carter Verhaeghe to score the game-winning goal just 1:05 later.

It was the same story against the Ducks on Thursday. The Bruins erased a two-goal deficit in the third period by scoring twice in 25 seconds but allowed Troy Terry to get open right in front of Korpisalo for the game-winner exactly 30 seconds after they had tied it.

“It’s not a teaching thing. It’s not anybody but ourselves,” Geekie said. “Each guy, myself included, has got to look in the mirror and decide what we want to do and how we want this year to go. I think we’re faced with it pretty quickly and we’ve got to decide what we want to do.”

This was expected to be a down season for the Bruins, who sold off a good part of their veteran core at the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline. As Sturm admitted after the game on Thursday, “Are we an elite team in this League? Probably not.” But the Bruins, and management, thought that they would be defensively stout, that they could win some of those 2-1 games, something president Cam Neely mentioned at the start of the season.

“I knew there was work to do, right? I thought it would be more work offensively than defensively," Sturm said. "That’s where I’m a little surprised. Yeah, we tweaked a few things system-wise, but still, it should be in our DNA. That’s the Boston Bruins’ DNA.”

Instead, they are scoring goals. Their defense is betraying them.

“It’s normal when you lose a lot of games in a row that you tighten your sticks and everything,” Sturm said. “That’s just, it happens. But those breakdowns in big moments, that can’t happen. Or losing battles in our own end. That can’t happen.”

The optimistic view says that it’s still early, that there are 73 more games to go in the season.

That’s little consolation now for the Bruins, though.

“It’s tough to be glass half full, to be honest with you,” Geekie said. “I think everybody’s sick of it in here.”

So what do they need to fix? What can they clean up before their next big test, another game against the Avalanche (5-0-3) at TD Garden on Saturday (3 p.m. ET; NHLN, NESN, ALT).

“Everything. Everything,” McAvoy said. “We are trying so hard. Even on the last goal, like we want to do the right thing. We want to go pressure the puck, the man on man. We just want it so bad that we’re getting in our own way. We’re doing too much. We’re not doing it the right way.

“We want it. You can see it, how we fight when we go down. We want it. We’re dying to win in here. We’re close every single game and we just can’t find a way to get over the hump. But we’re right there. So, the dam will break sooner or later.”