I refuse to take the lazy way out here. Therefore, I'm not going to say a double minor so patently bogus that it got someone of the most shameless profession to apologize in person was the reason that Devils lost a hard fought game against a team that's needed no favors as of late...
The truth of the matter is that the Bruins scored on the first half of what became a 5-on-3 after Marcus Johansson's tripping penalty, so the extra two didn't do any excess damage on the scoreboard. One could certainly argue that a team who looked wholeheartedly reenergized from the first drop of the puck didn't benefit from sitting around for 45 momentum-killing minutes while the scorekeepers in Boston summoned their inner-Andy Reid and made the stoners working your 11:30PM men's league game look like expert time technicians. But, aside from being blind to the elbow (that even I admittedly missed in real time) of a certain scumbag, the officiating didn't lose the Devils the game...
As has been the case for what seems like the last two months, crappy officiating certainly didn't help matters, but - other than having half their line-up plucked from the ice for in-game visits to the trainer's table - I'm having a tough time pointing out one thing that cost the Devils a game that they did more than enough to win. I suppose Ben Lovejoy's dimwitted pinch that ultimately led to the game-winning goal and was only successful in waking me up from the lengthy dream sequence we've been living out with him filling in as an adequate defensive fixture bears mentioning, but - as far as inexcusable gaffs go - that was pretty much it against a team that's been forcing them with consistency. Kyle Palmieri looked as though his skates had hit happy hour a little too hard, but whoever aided in injecting liquid courage directly into the blood stream of Pavel Zacha more than made up for that. Mix in a pair of increasingly rare 5-on-5 goals and what was perhaps the most well-rounded, composed, and - dare I say - dominant performance of Damon Severson's entire career, and it feels like there was way too much good going on for the outcome to be bad.
In fact, maybe the lack of having someone to truly blame is what made last night's loss so goddamn infuriating, because whatever was talked about in that closed-door, players-only meeting quite obviously hit home. For as close to 60 minutes as you could possibly ask out of a team hampered by injuries, they took it to not only one of the best teams in the conference, but one that has given them fits for years. Due - in part - to the same type of lucky, bullshit bounce that somehow evaded Devils' sticks all night, the Bruins stole two points that they probably didn't deserve. So while the result was insanely aggravating in the moment, the process was pretty close to perfect, and that should theoretically bode well for them if Taylor Hall and Cory Schneider can quickly return to a team that played like their asses were on fire on the second night of a back-to-back.
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