The Utah Mammoth’s first real gut punch of the season landed hard Thursday night.
Five games into the year, the losses hadn’t looked like this. But in a 6-1 defeat to the Boston Bruins, just about everything that had been humming for Utah early on vanished at once. The penalty kill slipped, the goaltending unraveled, and the scoring dried up in a hurry.
There was at least one bright spot buried in the mess: Jack McBain got on the board. His first goal of the season came on a tip of a Dmitri Simashev shot and snapped Jeremy Swayman’s shutout bid.
For a team that spent most of the night getting pushed around, it was a small but deserved payoff for McBain, who has spent the last two games throwing his weight around. He fought Will Cuylle after Cuylle drove Dylan Guenther hard into the boards, then dropped the gloves with Brendan Dillon in what was described as one of the best fights of his career.
McBain has never been the type to pile up points, but he has always brought physicality and two-way play. On a night with very little to celebrate, his goal stood out because it felt earned.
The rest of the special teams picture was ugly. Utah went 0-for-7 on the power play, a brutal result for a unit that had opened the season at the top of the NHL rankings and slipped from first to fifth because of Thursday’s night off the scoreboard. The Mammoth had chances and outshot Boston, but they never found the rhythm or pressure that had been so evident Tuesday against the New Jersey Devils.
Boston’s penalty kill did its job, but it was the Bruins’ own power play that swung the game. Utah killed only one of four Bruins opportunities, and Boston moved the puck with the kind of ease Utah had been showing with the man advantage. The Bruins were stringing together crisp passes and finishing chances quickly, while the Mammoth’s power play looked stuck in place.
“Their goalie played well,” head coach André Tourigny said. “Our special teams were really good since the start of the season.
For us, tonight was not the case. They won that battle, and I think that’s what tipped the scale.”
Swayman made several key stops, but there was also one sequence that drew plenty of attention when Mason Lohrei made a huge stick save in front of an open net. Michael Carcone’s reaction said plenty.
Then came the goaltending collapse. Sebastian Cossa, making just his second appearance with the Mammoth, posted a .625 save percentage and gave up three goals in 15 minutes. It was the kind of night that can snowball fast, and while Cossa would have wanted at least a few of those goals back, the skaters in front of him didn’t help much.
“Not good,” Clayton Keller said. “We hung Cossa out there to dry a little bit.
We got to learn from it. We got embarrassed tonight.”
Karel Vejmelka took over and allowed three more. That was only part of the problem, though.
The defensive structure fell apart too, with every pairing finishing as a minus except for the bottom pair of Simashev and Andrew Peeke. John Marino also had two giveaways, an unusual rough edge in a game where Utah needed clean puck management and never got it.
Even with all of that, Tourigny made it clear this wasn’t about one goalie or one stretch of play.
“It will be a great, great learning experience for him,” Tourigny said. “What’s important is he cannot beat himself up. There’s a tip, there’s a screen, there’s stuff that happens.”
He added: “It’s not Cossa or anybody in particular on our team; I think it’s a team effort, coach, player, everybody,” Tourigny said. “We need to look at what we can do better.”
Now the task is to move on quickly. Utah has a day off before heading to Buffalo, where the Mammoth will review the tape and try to clean up what went wrong. Tourigny said the team needs time before reacting too sharply.
“Let it sting a little bit,” Tourigny said. “We need to sit on it and let us think before reloading anything. We’ll need to think about what we can take from that game, and coaches will look at the tape and make a better assessment tomorrow than we can do with the emotion tonight.”
Keller said the response has to be immediate.
“You got to have a short memory in this league,” Keller said. “You can’t get too high.
There’s so many good teams, and there’s no easy night ever. We got to be ready for Buffalo for sure.”
The Mammoth face the Sabres on Saturday. Buffalo is 2-2-0 and comes in after a 4-0 loss to the Dallas Stars. The teams last met in November, when Utah beat Buffalo 5-2 at the Delta Center.
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