BOSTON — The mini-surge that the Bruins produced coming out of the trade deadline appears to be over.
After playing two terrific games in wins over Tampa Bay and Florida to briefly — very briefly — cause the most hopeful of optimists to daydream about the possibility of a late surge toward a playoff berth, the Bruins have crashed back into reality.
But if Thursday’s lopsided loss in Ottawa didn’t extinguish remaining hope, Saturday’s 6-2 defeat to the Lightning on Saturday at TD Garden should have snuffed it out.
Boston was outshot 39-12 and wasn’t competitive after the first period.
The Bruins fell to 30-30-8 with 14 games to go.
The Bruins had some momentum going into the second period after Elias Lindholm’s goal off a pretty pass from Andrew Peeke tied the game, 1-1 with 4:02 left in the period.
But the second period erased that in a hurry. In the middle 20 minutes, the Bruins had no shots on goal. They only attempted four shots of any kind and none of them reached Andrei Vasilevskiy.
At the other end, Jeremy Swayman was busy. He allowed three goals on 20 attempts.
The Bruins finally got another shot on goal and good things happened early in the third. Marat Khusnutdinov’s shot through traffic trickled through Vasilevskiy 23 seconds into the third period to make it 4-2.
Tampa added two empty-netters later to pull away.
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