The Bruins didn’t play a clean game in San Jose, but they found the exact mix that has been carrying them: enough scoring spread across the lineup and another heavy lift from Jeremy Swayman.
Swayman stopped 35 shots, and Boston turned that into a 6-3 win over the Sharks at SAP Center on Tuesday to open a four-game road trip. The Bruins kept answering every push from San Jose, never spent a moment trailing, and leaned on a few timely bounces along the way.
The early damage came from a line that keeps making noise. Fraser Minten scored twice, giving him three goals in two games, while Marat Khusnutdinov and JJ Peterka kept the puck moving around him.
Minten opened the scoring at 12:55 of the first period after jumping on during a change and burying a Casey Mittelstadt feed with a hard wrister from above the circles. Later in the frame, he finished off another strong shift by the trio when Charlie McAvoy jumped into a scramble, knocked the puck loose, and Peterka slipped it back to him at the top of the crease for a 2-1 lead with 1:17 left.
Boston also got goals from Matt Poitras, Pavel Zacha, Morgan Geekie and Will Borgen, with Borgen sealing it with an empty-net bank shot from long distance at 1:42 to cap the scoring. It was his first goal as a Bruin and made him the 15th Black-and-Gold skater to score this year.
The Sharks kept hanging around because the Bruins kept coughing pucks up in dangerous spots. Boston’s puck management created problems all night, and those mistakes turned into penalties and San Jose pressure.
The first Sharks equalizer came at 15:29 of the opening period after the Bruins tried to get aggressive on a faceoff just outside their own zone. Marco Sturm put Matt Poitras and David Pastrnak out for the draw, Poitras got tossed from the circle, Pastrnak lost it cleanly, and Jacob Trouba cashed in from the blue line just as a Nikita Zadorov penalty expired.
San Jose also pulled even at 2-2 early in the second on the power play after a Boston too-many-men penalty. Macklin Celebrini ripped a one-timer past Swayman at 5:04 to tighten things up, and the Sharks’ top young talent struck again a little later in the period. Celebrini, the first overall pick in 2024, delivered a perfect pass to Ivar Stenberg, the second overall pick last June, for the teenager’s first career goal at 5:48.
Boston answered both times. Poitras restored the lead at 8:42 after Mark Kastelic’s dump-in work created a strange bounce behind the net, with the puck kicking back out to the back post for an easy finish. Then, with three seconds left in the period, Geekie finished a 2-on-1 by taking a pass from Zacha and ripping a wrist shot past Yaroslav Askarov to make it 4-2.
There was more chaos in the third. The Sharks cut it to 4-3 on the power play after Boston took another too-many-men penalty, and Zadorov then dropped the gloves with Darnell Nurse in a lopsided fight that sent him to the box for five minutes.
The Bruins absorbed that stretch and then buried the next one that mattered. Mason Lohrei jumped into a 3-on-2, lost the puck, and got a fortunate bounce to Khusnutdinov, who set up Minten for his second goal of the night at 11:37.
From there, San Jose pulled the goalie, and Borgen sent the puck the rest of the way with the empty-netter. The Bruins may not have looked sharp in every zone, but they left San Jose with a road win because the scoring kept coming and Swayman kept answering.
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