The Boston Bruins got another look at what separates them from the NHL’s best on Saturday night. 

The Bruins (13-6-1) dropped their second straight on TD Garden ice, falling 6-2 to the Western Conference-leading Minnesota Wild (15-3-4) in the third of a four-game homestand. Fraser Minten and David Pastrnak scored the two Bruins’ goals, while Jeremy Swayman made 19 saves on 24 shots in his fifth regulation loss of the season. 

For the second straight game, the Bruins got off to a slow start. The Wild scored before the seven-minute mark, then extended their lead to three in the first two minutes of the second period. 

“It’s not nice to chase the games against probably the best defensive team in the league right now. I mean, [they don’t] give up much,” Nikita Zadorov said postgame. “You go down one, you go down two, three, and at the end of the day, you’re in a hole, and it’s hard to climb out against top teams like this. They’re experienced, they play good defense, they have a good goalie. I just feel like we just need to be a little bit more patient, like kind of stay patient in those games. It just didn’t go that way.” 

The Wild “won the game right away,” said David Pastrnak.

The visitors were quick to act after goals went in. They found the back of the net twice in a 67-second span in the second period, which pushed the game out of reach for the Bruins. 

“When you play a top team like that, they do that to you,” Sturm said. “And that’s where we just have to be better than that. And that’s what [we] got to learn, too. The next shift after you score, that’s the biggest one. And it was for them, not for us, unfortunately. And that’s something, yeah, for sure, we need to do better.” 

Fraser Minten scored a power-play goal, and Tanner Jeannot sparked the crowd with a fight right after the faceoff. John Hynes used his timeout, and the Wild made it 4-1 just 90 seconds later.

“Yeah, it’s really bad timing, especially at home for us. We have great fans and great momentum on our side,” Minten said. “You can see that; their coaches are thinking about it, calling timeouts and stuff. So we got to use that to our advantage and have better timing with not letting goals against right after we get momentum.”

The Bruins are now 1-5-0 this season when playing teams ranked ahead of them in the league standings. Their one win came in a shootout against the Vegas Golden Knights. The Wild swept them in the season series, and they slid down the rankings after losses on Thursday and Saturday.

“Obviously, they are the measurement sticks. They are the good teams. But we try to focus on ourselves, trying to get better,” Pastrnak said. “We know that [we’re] obviously not playing our way right now. We have to play better defensively, starting with me and stuff. So getting a lot of goals scored against, you know, that’s against our identity. So we’re going to clear that out and make sure to be ready for next week. It was a tough week, points-wise for us. More importantly, we know we’ve got much better, and we have to start playing the way we can and the way we are built, and play better in front of Sway.”

Despite the Bruins being outscored 11-4 over the last two games, they were not entirely discouraged by their performances. Zadorov even went as far as to say they “were outplaying both” Montreal and Minnesota. Marco Sturm also found positives in Saturday’s performance, which he thought was better than Thursday’s. 

“Montreal was just okay. I thought today, it was actually better. The score, unfortunately, doesn’t show it,” Sturm said. “They scored at the right moment, and they do everything. Seems like they do it right. They’re a Cup contender for a reason, and they showed us how you have to play a man’s game. So it was good to see for us. I think those are the teams now, we want to be like one of them. And we’re just not there yet. I think there’s a lot of things I truly believe [that’s] going to help us moving forward by just playing against teams like that, especially tonight.” 

The numbers back up some of that sense from the room. At 5-on-5, the Bruins outattempted Minnesota 43-26 and held an 11-1 advantage in high-danger chances. Through the full 60 minutes, the Bruins generated 4.16 expected goals to Minnesota’s 2.94. But the actual goals count, not the expected ones, and you can’t bank on a 5-on-5 game when you are the second-most penalized team in the league.

“With this game and with last game, I think when we played the right way, we got a lot of opportunities. It’s just a matter of being able to finish. You’re not going to be able to do that every night, but we’ve been doing it at a high rate this year,” Charlie McAvoy said postgame. “There’s always going to be ebbs and flows. I think the last two games, there were definitely pockets where we got a lot of looks, whether it was 5-on-5 or special teams. It’s just a matter of trying to put them in and be able to change the game.”

The Bruins have relied on both finishing and goaltending this season, and those two strengths helped the team get off to a strong start. Neither was there on Saturday night. The Bruins struggled to finish their chances, while Swayman had another difficult night in goal.

Fraser Minten called it “a humbling week” for the Bruins, who have now lost consecutive games against two of the NHL’s top teams. The Bruins have one more game left in their homestand, giving them a chance to get back on track as they enter the second quarter of the season. 

“Just being around a little bit, you just take it a day at a time in this league, and that’s it,” McAvoy said. “You’re not going to have your best every single night, and it’s unfortunate that the last two against quality opponents, I don’t think we had enough good. There was good, but just not enough of it, and not enough finish. But we’ll go back and learn from it, and it’s a long season, so I don’t think there’s any reason to be discouraged. We’ve put ourselves in a really good spot so far. And there’s always going to be games like these in the season. You learn from it, and then you flush it.”