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PANTHERS 5, BRUINS 1 [ Game stats ]
They take turn for the worse against Bure, Panthers
And their playoff chances are shriveling at the same rate, their season unraveling as rapidly as the team did the past two nights, capped by last evening's 5-1 humbling by the Florida Panthers before a FleetCenter crowd of 17,565 that spent the last 10 minutes indulging in bloodthirsty booing.
This lost weekend was the Bruins' season in microcosm. With a chance to gain precious ground in the Eastern Conference, they suffered two deflating losses in 24 hours - beginning with Friday's 5-2 killer in New York - both because of eyeblink lapses in the third period that proved fatal.
As a result, they're now in far worse shape than when they began the weekend. Having taken the ice at Madison Square Garden with a chance to match the Rangers for the eighth and last conference playoff berth, they instead remain on a ninth-place treadmill. And now they have company, caught by the Buffalo Sabres, who have a game in hand and Dominik Hasek back in the net.
Still, they had a chance to close in on the new eighth-place club, the Pittsburgh Penguins, who lost to the New York Islanders last night but retained a 3-point lead on Boston with two games in hand.
The Bruins still have 25 games to erase that slim deficit, but as captain Ray Bourque said, ''Every loss hurts big time right now. Pretty soon, we're going to run out of games. We need to get on a roll. Win-one, lose-one ain't going to get it done.''
The Bruins would have settled for that this weekend. And they seemed to have a chance for a split. Though they entered the third period trailing the Panthers, 2-1, they had carried the play for much of the first 40 minutes - but unfortunately for them, they didn't start asserting themselves until they were two goals in arrears.
And then they replicated their downfall of the previous night, when the Rangers' Jan Hlavac completed his first career hat trick in a 46-second span to break open a 3-2 game.
This time the coup de grace was applied by Florida dervish Pavel Bure, who gets around faster than a tabloid rumor. At 8:32 of the third period, Bure zoomed into the left side of the Bruins' zone and launched a slap shot that trickled between the pads of goalie Byron Dafoe, who had come out of his crease to cut down the angle. The puck kept rolling; before Dafoe could recover, it was at the left post, and so was Bure, nudging it home for his NHL-leading 39th goal.
''When it was 3-1, I thought they still had a chance,'' said Bure, who is either extremely polite or painfully unaware of the Bruins' finishing futility.
At any rate, it became academic when Florida struck for two goals within seven seconds - and chased Dafoe - starting at 10:35.
With Joe Thornton in the penalty box for charging, Mark Parrish was at the left side of the Boston crease to take a feed from Ryan Johnson. Dafoe went horizontal to stop the initial shot, but he was helpless as the puck ricocheted off his pads back to Parrish, who lifted it to the far side for his - and the Panthers' - second power-play goal. That certainly won't improve the mood of Bruins owner/shorthanded critic Jeremy Jacobs, assuming he was tuning in from Buffalo.
Dafoe barely had time to regain his feet before Paul Laus belted a prayer from just outside the right circle that caromed off the goalie's pads and inside the near post. At that point, coach Pat Burns mercifully replaced Dafoe - who may sit out a game or two - with Rob Tallas, but there was no escape for the Bruins.
Once again, their inability to convert a bushel of scoring chances left them vulnerable.
''There's a black cloud over us in all aspects right now,'' said Burns, whose job is continually rumored to be in jeopardy despite vigorous disclaimers from president/general manager Harry Sinden. ''It's wins and losses and ties and the uncertainty around the team, what's going on.''
If the Bruins are to go on past April, they'll need to do a better job of finding the net than they did the past two nights. Against the Panthers, only Shawn Bates was able to get the puck past goalie Mikhail Shtalenkov. And by the time he struck at 13:15 of the first period, Johnson (5:27) and Parrish (12:06) already had victimized Dafoe by cashing in wide-open setups.
Burns insists that there is no quit in his team - ''I wish people would [get off] that'' - but there are no results, either. ''I can't teach finishing,'' said the coach.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 2/13/2000.
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heir offense apparently having gone south for the winter, the Bruins' margin for error in every game lately has been reduced to the size of a miser's heart.