EDMONTON — There were fewer than four minutes left in the third period, and it appeared that the Bruins were going to go down in defeat to the cellar-dwelling, bottom-feeding, fewest-points-in-the-NHL Oilers, ending their five-game winning streak.
But then David Krejci had the puck behind the net. Then he sent a pass to an advancing Zdeno Chara in the slot. Then the game was tied with 3:21 to go.
The Bruins had come back, as they have in many of their recent games. They had picked up their play at the end. They had tied the game, though in this one they wouldn’t go ahead, eventually losing in a shootout, 3-2, on a Jordan Eberle goal.
It was an admirable comeback, sure. But it shouldn’t get to that point.
“I don’t think you want to make that a habit, that you’re down one goal and then all of a sudden you start playing like you should have been right off the bat,” said Tuukka Rask, who make 34 saves. “So, that’s been the case a few times here. I think we have to fix that. You want to be the team ahead, not the team chasing all the time.”
The Bruins had survived overtime, including the final 1:06 while on the penalty kill. That came because of an interference call on Matt Beleskey, which produced a frightening moment for Rask.
Beleskey crashed into Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who crashed into Rask. As Rask, who was slow to get up, said, “I was a little shaken up there. Just cracked my neck. Free chiropractor, I guess.”
It was hard to have a sense of humor about the rest of the game. Before Chara’s goal, the lethargic Bruins did not look like a team coming off a lengthy rest — they hadn’t played since Friday against the Rangers — and they certainly didn’t look like a team that wanted to come out of Edmonton with a win.
“Just very average. I think we were average tonight,” coach Claude Julien said. “Our skating game was there, but we didn’t play a real hard game tonight and that’s what we needed to do. We needed to skate. We needed to play hard against this team and we chose to kind of play a little bit more of their type of game.”
They did, finally, but only in the waning minutes of the third.
“I thought when we tied the game at 2-2, the last five minutes all of a sudden we started playing our game,” Julien said. “Had we played like that the whole game, we would have probably a better result.”
The Oilers were the first to break through, engineering a two-on-one at 10:23 of the second period while shorthanded on a bad line change by Boston.
The Bruins had been on the power play after a hit on Landon Ferraro by Eric Gryba along the boards. But Matt Hendricks tapped the puck over to Mark Letestu, who tapped it past Rask, with Torey Krug the only Bruin back.
It was the first shorthanded goal allowed by the Bruins this season — and the first scored all season by Oilers.
Asked about the line change that resulted in the shorthanded goal, Julien said only, “Next question.”
The Bruins tied it with 1:33 left in the period, on a long shot by Krug, which deflected off Andrej Sekera and past Anders Nilsson. The goal came on a shift in which Brett Connolly had replaced Frank Vatrano on the Patrice Bergeron-Brad Marchand line.
Edmonton then went back ahead at 9:22 of the third period, when Hendricks crashed the net and beat Rask. That set up Chara’s late-game heroics. But it shouldn’t need to come to that, especially against one of the worst teams in the NHL – at least not if the Bruins have goals to be among the best.
“We played a team that worked hard,” Chara said. “They have obviously a lot of skill. They’re a very dangerous team and we didn’t have our best game. We need to be better. We certainly need to work much harder, winning more battles and races. It just wasn’t good enough. We got a point out of it, but I think that we have to realize that if we keep playing like this, it’s just a matter of time where we’re going to burn ourselves.”
Amalie Banjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @amaliebenjamin.