Bruins Come Home to Face Chicago After a 4-1 Loss in St. Louis That Their Coach Called a 'Wake-Up Call'

The Bruins are back at TD Garden at 1 p.m. Saturday against the Chicago Blackhawks, and if the head coach is right, they needed the loss that sent them home. Boston fell 4-1 to the St. Louis Blues on Thursday at Enterprise Center to finish a road trip, and Marco Sturm did not pretend otherwise.

"It was creeping in. Even the games we won lately, on the end, we were just sloppy, I would say. It finally caught up to us a little bit on this road trip," Sturm said, according to the team's postgame story. "You just can't play that way. Maybe we needed it. Hopefully it's going to be a bit of a wake-up call for us. Just got to move on."

It actually started fine. James Hagens gave Boston a 1-0 lead at 5:28 of the first period, his fifth goal and 10th point of the season. Casey Mittelstadt picked the puck off the wall after an attempted clear by Blues goalie Joel Hofer and whipped it toward the net, and Hagens tipped it through his legs. The 19-year-old now has the second-most points of any NHL rookie, behind only Gavin McKenna, who has 11, according to the team. That is a nice line for a teenager in his first season, and it came on the kind of goal coaches love: go to the net, get a stick on it.

"I saw Hags pretty open, and he has a heck of a tip," Mittelstadt said. "It was a good start. Obviously it would've been nice to build on it a little bit better than we did."

They did not build on it. Jimmy Snuggerud tied it with a power-play snapshot at 15:43 of the first. Philip Broberg put St. Louis ahead at 5:17 of the second, and Robert Thomas made it 3-1 at 12:08. Jake Neighbours finished it with a backhander at 12:42 of the third, the Blues' second power-play goal of the night.

That last one bothered Sturm the most. "That's on us. I don't think they did anything special; we talked about it, that was just a mental break on certain individuals," he said. "But overall, it just felt like it happened all night."

Hampus Lindholm was even blunter. "This league humbles you quick when you're not doing the right things, and we kind of saw it go into effect tonight," he said. "I think we had some moments in the game, but over 60 minutes, too many mistakes and we got punished."

Here is the thing worth noticing: nobody in that room argued with the coach. Mittelstadt said he did not think it was "time to panic or anything," and added, "I think we've got some confidence and some swagger in here, so go home and regroup." David Pastrnak called it a "tough road trip" in which the team "didn't play to our standard."

"The biggest takeaway is when we are winning, we flip the page, we come to work the next day and get better," Pastrnak said. "It's hard, but we're going to do the same. We have a big game Saturday, so we're going to get home, get better tomorrow and get back in the winning column."

For context, the Bruins came into this trip on a decent run. Earlier in the month they earned seven of eight possible points on the road, and Michael DiPietro posted his first NHL shutout in a 6-0 win on Oct. 23, according to the team's site. So this is not a team in crisis. It is a team whose coach thinks it has been getting away with things.

Two power-play goals against is the specific problem. Penalty kill breakdowns are the kind of thing that look like bad luck for a week and then turn out to be a habit. Saturday's game will be the first chance to see whether the message landed.

Hagens is the other thing to watch. A 19-year-old who scores by standing in front of the net and redirecting pucks is doing the hard part of the job, and the tip on Thursday was a good one. If he keeps pace with McKenna, the rookie scoring race could run through Boston all season.

What we still don't know: whether Sturm changes the lineup or the penalty-kill units for Saturday, and who starts in goal against Chicago.