After Tuesday’s 1-0 loss to the Panthers, Bruins head coach Claude Julien said his team wasn’t good enough to show up, not work hard and win hockey games. The message didn’t stick last night. It wasn’t a must win for Julien’s club, but it was awfully close. Coming off the club’s longest winning streak in four years, the Bruins came into Thursday’s game losers of two in a row. There was the 10-2 annihilation at the hands of the Capitals and a 1-0 home loss two nights ago which saw Alex Auld make 31 saves and his teammates come up empty on 40 shots of their own.

“I don’t know if it’s overconfidence,” goaltender Tim Thomas said. “Now we don’t have it anymore. We have to get back to that blue area.”

It’s ugly to suggest the second period of last night’s 8-2 loss resembled the first period of Monday’s debacle, but that’s exactly what it did. The Bruins were out-skated, outshot and outplayed from start to finish, and it all came crashing down when Thomas was pulled in favor of Auld, who received the Bronx cheer upon making his first save of the game.

“Tim has been good for us all year,” Julien said. “He’s fighting it right now. You give him credit where credit is due and right now he is fighting the puck.”

It was a defensive struggle early on; the two clubs combined for just three shots over the first seven minutes of the first period. And it took a Dennis Wideman hook to create the first real chances of the game for either team, Jason Blake on a shot from the slot and Darcy Tucker, playing in his 800th game, from the dot.

"We didn't start great," Toronto head coach Paul Maurice said. "I know I shouldn't bring out the negative on a night like this, but the first seven minutes, I wasn't overly excited."

The Bruins scored the game’s first goal with 8:20 left in the opening frame as Andrew Ference found a streaking David Krejci at center ice, the forward taking the puck down the right side before hitting a cutting Peter Schaefer in stride, who went to the backhand to nick it between the legs of Vesa Toskala.

Three minutes later, the Maple Leafs tied the game at one as P.J. Axelsson got called for holding Mats Sundin, which allowed Thomas Kaberle to fire a puck from the point that got caught up in a scrum down low. Jason Blake came to clean up the garbage, beating Thomas on a puck that he might have gotten a piece of.

The score could have been worse; the Leafs got another major scoring chance with a minute and a half left in the period as Kaberle took a shot from the point which bounced off the pad of Thomas and out to Matt Stajan, who hit the post with a slapper that could be heard from the upper reaches of the building. Then the flood gates opened.

Toronto took the lead for good just over a minute into the second when Alexi Ponikarovsky grabbed a bouncing puck at center ice and streaked to the left point, ripped a wrist shot by the outstretched glove of Thomas. It was his 15th of the season and a sign of things to come as the Leafs had outshot the Bruins 16-8 at that point in the game.

The Leafs scored another power play goal after Glen Murray was whistled for holding Alex Steen at the 16:51 mark, and Brian McCabe’s shot from the point caught a body in traffic fooling the bewildered Thomas. The fourth goal came minutes later when Matt Stajan’s shot from the right goal line beat Thomas under the padding, edging past the goal line on the left side. Thomas wasn’t thrilled when the ruling upstairs came out against him and was less thrilled to meet the Toronto forward head-on during the play. .

"Obviously the score got kind of carried away," Steen said. "I thought we played a solid hockey game aside from the first seven or eight minutes, when we were a little flat footed." We battled through that and we were really strong after that."

The goaltending was bad, but it was a total letdown team-wide for Boston. Zdeno Chara’s cross-check of Steen led to the fifth goal of the night, Nik Antropov’s 25th of the season on the 23rd shot of the night, and the one which sent Thomas to the bench for the second time in as many starts. Auld found little success either as Andrew Ference tripped up Stajan with just under 15 minutes left to play and Darcy Tucker capitalized for Toronto’s fourth power-play goal of the night.

Goal number seven came three minutes later, once again off the sick of Antropov and the final tally was Mats Sundin’s 30th of the season. The captain also had two assists extending his point streak to seven straight games.

“It wasn’t just one guy tonight, it was 20 guys,” said Bruins forward Marc Savard. “The good news is it can’t get any worse.”

It was the sixth game in a row in which the Maple Leafs had earned a point. They moved to 4-0-1 in their last five games on the road and have won the last three meetings against their division rivals. A good stretch for a team on the outside looking in for a playoff spot in the wildly contentious Eastern Conference.

Game Notes

Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin became the 46th player in league history to play in 1,300 NHL games. He has scored 523 goals and notched 764 assists over that span.

Last night marked the 20th straight start for Leafs goaltender Vesa Toskala. He has played in a career high 54 games this season and has set a career mark in wins with 26.

When asked to clarify his comments from Tuesday, Julien said, “I think every player understands it’s not something about putting our team down. You know we’ve responded to our team philosophy all year and it’s gotten us this far. And when we get away from it, we certainly are not as good as we know we can be. That was my explanation behind that.”

Cam Neely took part in a Boston.com fan chat Thursday where he addressed what he is learning in his first season in the front office, “What I've tried to do is spend as much time with Peter Chiarelli as possible, both at home and on the road, and to really get a good understanding of the direction we want to take the team, the type of team we want to put together. I've enjoyed the few times I've gone on the ice to work with some of our younger guys and also appreciated the opportunity to meet with our scouting staff and just get a good feel for what their roles entail and how important they are to a franchise.”

A very happy birthday to Milt Schmidt. He celebrated his 90th on Wednesday.