The road is only going to get harder for Bruins after ’embarrassing’ loss to Leafs

"You get spoiled by our goalies. Hopefully it's going to be a little bit of a wakeup call."

Marco Sturm and the Bruins let two points slip away on Tuesday against Toronto. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff

March 25, 2026 | 7:36 AM

4 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

Bruins GM Don Sweeney expressed confidence in his club prior to Tuesday’s home matchup against the cellar-dwelling Maple Leafs.

“They were happy and grateful for keeping this group together and not worrying about picking up an extra [draft] pick,” Sweeney said Tuesday of Boston’s decision not to sell off pieces at the trade deadline. “All the guys in here have contributed to our success thus far, and the staff wants to see that through. We believe we’re a playoff team.”

They didn’t look like it on Tuesday night against Toronto.

In a grueling playoff push all across the Eastern Conference, Tuesday represented a well-earned reprieve for Marco Sturm and his club.

Fresh off of arguably their biggest win of the season on Saturday in a critical road victory against the Red Wings, the Bruins returned home — where they boasted a 26-9-1 record — to take on a tanking Maple Leafs crew.

Two points were seemingly well within the Bruins’ grasp, especially against a Toronto team both playing without captain Auston Matthews and mired in a 2-8-4 slump since returning from the Olympic break.

Instead, the Bruins left their home ice with zero points to show for against one of the few “tomato cans” left in an otherwise brutal stretch to close out the 2025-26 campaign.

“I thought we tried our best to talk about it before the game, what this spot would be like: Coming off a really emotional win and playing against a team that obviously is not in the spot that we’re in,” Charlie McAvoy said postgame after Boston’s 4-2 loss to Toronto. “We talked about it all day today that we couldn’t show up flat, and we still did. So, yeah, it just wasn’t good enough for us.”

As much as Boston’s loss to the Leafs prevented Toronto from inching closer to a top-five pick in the upcoming draft (transferring the pick back to Toronto instead of Boston), zero points secured was still a brutal setback for Sturm’s club.

“The whole game was full of disappointment,” Sturm said, adding, “I think [Jeremy] Swayman was pretty much the only guy – I think he played. Other than that, you can pick areas, you can pick players, we just didn’t bring it.”

Indeed, Swayman was one of the few positives for the Bruins on Tuesday. Despite Boston’s current back-to-back slate between Toronto and Buffalo on Wednesday night, Sturm opted to roll with Swayman again on Tuesday in hopes of banking some valuable points.

Swayman held up his end of the bargain, stopping 31 of 34 shots. Even with three goals allowed, it was a testament to the porous play in front of Boston’s netminder that he still closed out the night with 1.35 goals saved above expected (per MoneyPuck).

Against a seemingly punchless Toronto offense, the Bruins regularly coughed up pucks and relinquished several odd-man rushes and other quality looks.

“We’ve been spoiled [by our goalies],” Sturm acknowledged. “Even the games we won, if you look at the expected goals against, it was a little bit high. You get spoiled by our goalies. Hopefully it’s going to be a little bit of a wakeup call.

“Like today, you can’t give up over 10 odd-man rushes against. You just can’t. Two is already a lot in a game. I think we had 12 today. That says it all how our game was today.”

The Bruins weren’t much better down the other end of the ice.

“We were OK in the first,” Elias Lindholm said. “The second period, our power play was terrible. It killed the momentum.”

Boston only cashed in on one of its five power-play bids on Tuesday, while also giving up a shorthanded tally to Matthew Knies in the second period.

Special-team woes plagued Boston throughout the night. A costly five-minute major penalty for boarding assessed against Nikita Zadorov (with Henri Jokiharju already in the sin bin) led to a power-play tally from Toronto’s Max Domi.

Less than 10 seconds after Zadorov’s major penalty expired, William Nylander scored to give Toronto a 3-1 edge just three minutes into the third period.

“Didn’t have emotions against the Toronto Maple Leafs,” Zadorov acknowledged. “That’s on us for sure. We gotta be better than that. It’s important points for us at home, and to drop it like this, it’s embarrassing.”

Letdown showings — even against seemingly tanking opponents — inevitably arise over the course of a long season.

Still, the Bruins don’t exactly have the luxury of letting even a point or two slip away from them — not in this relentless playoff race.

Boston might still sit in the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference with 86 points. But both the red-hot Ottawa Senators and New York Islanders sit right behind them with 85 points apiece. The Red Wings? 84 points.

It’s not going to get any easier for the Bruins.

Not banking any points against a dreadful Toronto could come back to bite Boston in the coming days, given that the Bruins are staring at an uphill climb over the next few weeks.

Boston is right back at it on Wednesday, closing out a back-to-back slate on the road against a Sabres team that is 33-6-3 in their last 42 games.

After that?

A home game against a talented Minnesota Wild team (92 points) on Saturday.
A road game on the second leg of a back-to-back against a scorching Blue Jackets team on Sunday.
A home game against one of the top teams in the league in the Stars (97 points) on March 31.

Points will be hard to come by, to say the least. Which makes Tuesday’s no-show performance even more disheartening for a Bruins team whose playoff hopes are still far from being realized.