The Bruins were buried before they ever found their footing Tuesday night at TD Garden, and by the time the dust settled, the Ottawa Senators had left Boston with a 4-1 win.
Ottawa needed only a little more than 25 minutes to build a 4-0 lead, and that was the game. Tim Stutzle scored twice to lead the Senators, while Michael Amadio and Drake Batherson also beat Jeremy Swayman in a lopsided opening stretch. Swayman finished with 20 saves, but the scoreboard around him did the damage.
Linus Ullmark started in net for Ottawa and stopped 10 shots through two periods before leaving with an undisclosed injury. Samuel Ersson took over and made 8 saves in relief, and still picked up the win.
Boston’s lone goal came from James Hagens, who scored his second of the season and first Bruins goal at TD Garden on Ersson early in the third period.
The night turned in a hurry after a messy first few minutes. The Bruins had one of their best chances early when Morgan Geekie broke in alone, only to ring a shot off the post. But Boston’s first power play quickly erased any momentum that chance might have built.
That man advantage unraveled almost immediately. JJ Peterka had been moved down to the second unit, with Elias Lindholm bumped up, but the whole group looked disjointed from the start.
Sloppy puck movement and risky decisions piled up, and then David Pastrnak tried a dangerous, mostly-blind drop pass. Michael Amadio picked it off and turned it into a 2-on-1 going the other way.
The Senators carried that energy into the second period and blew the game open. Just 66 seconds in, James Hagens tried to force a zone entry while his defensemen were changing, and Ottawa jumped on it. The turnover sent Batherson in alone, and he finished with a couple of clean dekes to make it 2-0.
Ottawa didn’t let up. The Senators took over possession, won loose pucks all over the ice, and kept pressing Boston back. After a string of passes around the zone, Amadio finished from point-blank range to make it 4-0 just 5:22 into the period.
At that point, Jim Montgomery called timeout and let his team hear it. Boston had only five shots on goal, and just three of them came at 5-on-5. It was a bleak picture for the home side.
After the timeout, Boston shuffled the lines hard. The bottom six became James Hagens, Matthew Poitras and Marat Khusnutdinov on one line, with Tanner Jeannot, Fraser Minten and Mark Kastelic on another. Sturm kept mixing and matching from there, and for stretches of the third period the top six looked like this: Morgan Geekie, Pavel Zacha and David Pastrnak; Casey Mittelstadt, Elias Lindholm and JJ Peterka.
The changes didn’t solve everything, but the lower lines did bring some life. Hagens, in particular, bounced back from his earlier mistake.
He blocked a heavy shot in his own end, helped move the puck out, then hustled to the loose puck when Ersson came out and mishandled it. Hagens stole it below the goal line and banked it off Ersson and in for his second goal of the year.
Boston tried to build on that and chase a second quick goal. Nikita Zadorov got a good look on a one-timer, but Ersson turned it aside.
By then, though, the night had already slipped away. The Bruins played out the closing minutes in a half-empty building, beaten by a division rival in one of the season’s first measuring-stick games.
Boston’s next chance comes Thursday at home against the struggling Utah Mammoth.
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