from Stephen Harris of the Boston Herald,

This come-from-ahead 6-3 loss to the Jack Eichel and the Buffalo Sabres represented a low point for the Bruins, their most disgraceful and inexcusable night’s work of the season.

The B’s blew the opportunity to pass Montreal (which lost to Washington) and take over the top spot in the Atlantic Division — and get a win to open what should be a fun week, with Friday’s Winter Classic at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

The B’s may have imagined before and during this game that they were a really good team, an elite team, a contender. But, man, did they get their bubble of fraudulent confidence burst in this one.

The Bruins had enough scoring chances in the first 40 minutes that they probably should have had, oh, say a 4-1 lead after two periods. Instead, it was just 2-1. But that seemed fine, especially when they made it 3-1 on David Krejci’s sleight-of-hand mid-air tap-in at 6:59 of the third.

But the B’s then thought it was going to be easy and simply stopped playing — letting the Sabres storm back for an easy win, led by ex-BU star Eichel’s two-goal, two-assist performance.

“That was our team not respecting, I guess, the game of hockey,” said B’s coach Claude Julien, in maybe the shortest postgame interview of his tenure. “When you take a lead like that and you make some of those plays that we made, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got yourselves to blame.”

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