Tim Thomas has always been known as somewhat of a slow starter, and it was no different for the Bruins goaltender this season. Coming off his second straight All-Star selection, coupled with winning his position’s highest individual honor -- the Vezina Trophy -- Thomas was lugging around his fair share of lofty expectations. Not that he was really worried about it. “My job is still the same as it’s always been: stop the puck,” said the unaffected Thomas. The 35-year-old was coming off his most accomplished season as a pro, and he came to training camp armed with his typically offbeat, thoughtful way of coping. But the affable B’s goalie wasn’t as well-prepared when life came calling with one of its unpleasant surprises. Two years after Thomas’ mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and went into remission, Thomas' life was once again touched by the dreaded disease. His father, Tim Sr., was diagnosed with colon cancer. The senior Thomas had

Things were getting downright historical for the Bruins Thursday night while matching up against the Montreal Canadiens, and not at all in a good way. Racing against time to avoid earning the title of most offensively inadequate team in 80 years of Black and Gold hockey, the Bruins simply couldn’t score a goal no matter what was attempted. The kitchen sink was chucked. The vulcanized rubber peppered the Montreal net with sufficient follow-up effort. Dogs and cats were living in matrimonial harmony while the hibernating Bears found new ways to come up short. The B’s team simply couldn’t locate the back of the net even with hockey’s version of GPS. For a third straight game -- after dropping consecutive shutout losses on the road for only the sixth time in franchise history – a shutout was looming with all manner of unpleasant questions to follow. The gloom momentarily worsened when the B’s finally appeared to score in the second period only to have

The numbers are beginning to tell the story with the Bruins offense this season, and this page-turner isn’t pretty. People will point to the absence of Marc Savard to explain the shortcomings of a team that can’t score during 5-on-5 play, and really, really, really has no shot at lighting the lamp once it sets out on the power play. But it goes well beyond not having Savard or bruising, human space-maker Milan Lucic in the lineup for much of the next month — if not longer. There are brief glimmers of offense as attested by Marco Sturm’s first-period storming of the Detroit net in Boston’s 2-0 loss Tuesday night at Joe Louis Arena — but Sturm couldn’t finish off the play against a diving, flopping Chris Osgood after Patrice Bergeron’s original long shot from the side wall created the B’s offensive opportunity. Savard said earlier this season after a loss that “We’re all Swedes. No Finnish for us tonight.”

It came down to one simple difference in the Bruins' tightly wrapped 1-0 defeat at the hands of the Rangers Sunday afternoon at Madison Square Garden. The B’s outshot the Rangers by a 29-23 count and outhit New York by a thumping 41-28 margin on a day when Boston normally might have been satisfied with plenty of the things accomplished on the frozen sheet. There was ample grit and discipline up and down the roster, but the “want to” quotient wasn’t the problem. It took a few weeks, but the Bruins have finally locked into their structured, systematic defensive style of play, and that’s been apparent since their skaters returned from a two-game road trip with a broken-down Milan Lucic and a busted-up Marc Savard. The B’s have allowed only 11 goals in those six games with both key contributors out of the lineup, but that hasn’t even been close to the issue at hand as Boston continues to hover at the .500 mark. The issue has been that the Big