3 Takeaways From Mammoth’s 6-1 Loss to Bruins

Out of anyone on the team, McBain was arguably the most deserving to score. He’s been one of the biggest leaders on the ice in the past two games, fighting both Will Cuylle and Brendan Dillon. The Cuylle fight was to defend his teammate, Dylan Guenther, after the Rangers forward checked him hard into the boards, while the Dillon fight was one of the best fights of his career.

McBain isn’t a points guy. He’s always been a guy who can chip in points, but his main strength comes from his physicality and two-way play. 

Every bad game can have a little bit of positivity sprinkled in there somewhere. On Thursday night, there wasn’t a lot of that. However, seeing McBain get rewarded for his two fights in the past two games is the best thing to come out of Thursday’s game for the Mammoth.

A Disaster on the PK and in Net

After a fantastic start to the season for the Mammoth’s power play, penalty kill, and goaltending, it all fell back to reality on Thursday. The power play went a whopping 0-for-7. That is an abysmal stat. It has regressed their man advantage rankings in the NHL from first all the way to fifth.

Yes, the Mammoth had a few chances on the power play, and they outshot the Bruins. However, when you have seven opportunities on the man advantage, you have to score on one of those, especially when you had the hottest power play going into the game. Yet, nothing clicked, and the Mammoth never had the pressure and passing they did on Tuesday against the New Jersey Devils.

The penalty kill was also abysmal, only killing one of the four power plays the Bruins had. The Bruins looked like the Harlem Globetrotters out on the ice on Thursday, making unreal passes to each other that quickly led to goals. You could also say they looked like what the Mammoth’s power play was supposed to be.

“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 did have a good game, making some massive saves. You could argue he didn’t even have the biggest save of the game, though, with Mason Lohrei making an impressive save with his stick right in front of the net with the goaltender down. Michael Carcone was clearly in disbelief when watching that play.

Then there’s the goaltending. Sebastian Cossa, in his second game with the Mammoth, put up a .625 save percentage and allowed three goals in 15 minutes. It was a disaster, and while Cossa certainly would’ve wanted some of those goals back, the defense in front of him wasn’t doing him any favors.

“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.”

Then Karel Vejmelka came in for relief and also let in three goals. It’s clear the goaltending wasn’t good, but the defense wasn’t good as well. Each defensive pairing was a minus pairing on Thursday, except for the bottom pair of Simashev and Andrew Peeke. John Marino had two giveaways. That’s not very characteristic of him.

Ironically, it wasn’t just the present Mammoth putting up bad defensive numbers. Despite the 6-1 win, former Mammoth JJ Peterka was a minus-one during the game, a visit from his past defensive woes in his game.

Refocusing on the goaltending, this is certainly a learning experience for young Cossa. Should the Mammoth have pulled him only 15 minutes into this game? Debatable. You don’t want your goaltender to get lit up for 60 minutes, which was how this game was trending. I’m sure Cossa didn’t want to be pulled either and probably wanted to find a way to salvage the game. However, it gave him some time to think about his mistakes. It’s important, though he doesn’t dwell too deeply on it.

“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.”

However, it’s not just Cossa who can learn from this disaster. It’s everyone who needs to learn from this.

“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.”

Big Response Needed on Saturday

There’s no other way to say it. Thursday night was a joke for the Mammoth. It’s one they have to quickly move on from and learn from.

There will be a day off for the Mammoth to travel to Buffalo and review some clips. Fix things that need to be fixed. Make some changes that need to happen.

There needs to be some time for the emotion to pass. Everyone is angry and rightfully so. The 6-0 loss was one of the worst losses in the Mammoth’s franchise history. 

“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.”

You can dissect this game all you want. We talked about how bad the power play was. We talked about how bad the penalty kill was. We talked about how the goaltending and the defense struggled. You can mention all of that, but at the end of the day, it all won’t matter if the Mammoth don’t learn from their mistakes.

On top of that, the Mammoth can’t let this loss hinder them going into their final game of the road trip. Learning from their mistakes is one thing. Letting them haunt you is another.

“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 will take on the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday. The Sabres are 2-2-0 to start the season and are coming off a 4-0 loss to the Dallas Stars. These two teams last met last November, with the Mammoth winning 5-2 at the Delta Center.