"I mean, you hope it's a one off," said Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy, whose club fell behind Toronto by two points in the Atlantic Division standings. "We've been going pretty well, and the guys were trying to work their way back in the game, whereas early in the year, I think sometimes - I don't know if we got feeling sorry for ourself or doubted ourselves, but we're well beyond that in these types of games.
"I think we were working back to it, and obviously some guys got frustrated with some calls, so they took themselves out of the right mindset, so you have to work through that…it's a loss, a home loss. They were clearly better than us - a team we may see down the road, so it's disappointing in that regard.
"We'll go back to work [Wednesday], and let's see how we respond Thursday. Yeah, it's disappointing we weren't better."
Cassidy added that the Bruins were stung by a string of issues with puck management, which Boston's bench boss attributed to the group not being ready to play from the jump - an unexpected development given how well the B's have started games during their recent stretch of 14 wins in 17 games.
"You have to take care of the puck, we didn't do enough of that early on," said Cassidy. "Obviously we weren't prepared to play…shared responsibility. That's our job as coaches, get them ready to play, and the players have got to be ready to play, know the magnitude of the game.
"We've been going well lately, so a bit of a surprise there in that area that we weren't sharp early on. If all those things don't happen, you need your goaltender to bail you out then, and that didn't happen either so give them credit for starting on time, and that's where the game got away from us.
"We chased it. Tough team to chase the game against."
While the Bruins were certainly unhappy with falling into a five-goal deficit, they did take some solace in responding with three straight goals to end the game (Jake DeBrusk, 18:19 of the second; Curtis Lazar, 13:02 of the third; and Taylor Hall, 17:38 of the third) and pull within two with 2:22 remaining in regulation.
"When a game is out of sight like that, it's about maintaining good habits and building towards the next game," said Charlie McAvoy. "Anything can happen, so we got within striking distance. It's about not continuing to snowball negatives, let's get back to playing our game and find something we can feel good about. Obviously, practice [on Wednesday] we'll take a dive into it and see where we went wrong tonight, but we'll be all right."
