It was an ugly special teams showing for the Bruins, but to put it in plainer terms, Friday's 3-0 loss against the Hurricanes in their black Friday matinee was just an ugly showing all around. 

The boo birds were prominent for a game in which the B's went 0-for-4 on the power play and saw their penalty kill allow three goals for the first time in a long time (see below). The Bruins didn't get a shot on net in either of their first two power plays, instead making sloppy passes that often left the offensive zone. 

"Your best players should be able to execute with tape-to-tape passes and that wasn't happening," Claude Julien said following the game. "Your penalty kill is supposed to bail you out, and when they've done a pretty good job throughout the year, but tonight, when you give them three goals on three attempts, that's unacceptable."

The team managed to get 37 shots on goal, but with Cam Ward as spectacular as he was in his first shutout of the season (click here for recap), it didn't matter. 

"You're going to have to be willing to out-battle him," Bruins forward Mark Recchi said of Ward, his teammate when the Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup in 2006. "He's a battle and we weren't quite willing to out-battle him."

THE THIRD PERIOD COMEBACK ONLY HAPPENS HALF THE TIME

On Friday, the Bruins failed to score the game's first goal for the 10th time in their last 12 games. As a result, their record in that span sits at just 5-5-2. The B's are getting all sorts of attention for the third periods they have strung together, but a team can't have comebacks without falling behind. Friday's game was more of the same, as the Bruins fell victim to the red-hot rookie Jeff Skinner with 15.8 seconds remaining in the first period. 

"It's getting old," Milan Lucic said of falling behind. "That's why I said we've got to find a way to … figure out how to score that fist goal. It's great that we've been able to overcome some deficits and get ourselves back in the game, but eventually it's going to catch up with us.

"We've got to take that upon ourselves as players to get ourselves ready and have a good start," he added. "That's basically it."

The Bruins have come back to tie five of the 10 games in which they've entered the third period trailing, but have come away with two points just twice. They're now 2-6-2 in those games, so despite their league-leading plus-15 goal differential, the "terrible habit" (Mark Recchi's words) of falling behind will fail to pay off more often than not. 

The Bruins seem very aware of the trend they've developed and hope that they can soon remedy it. 

"We're not worried about it," Brad Marchand, who scored early on in the third period on Wednesday, said after Friday's game. "Well, I guess you could say we have to find a way to fix the problem. I think that we just have to bear down when we're around the net. If we do that, pucks are going to start going in for us. We're all getting our chances. We're playing great periods, but the big thing for us is that we want to come in with the lead."

THE PENALTY KILL GETS KILLED

Jordan Caron spent Thanksgiving dealing with the flu, and when he awoke feeling even worse on Friday, the Bruins told him to stay home. With Caron out, Daniel Paille was inserted into the lineup. 

Caron, a staple in the Bruins' top-ranked penalty kill entering the game, ended up being missed quite dearly on Friday. Paille, who has proven perfectly capable on the kill, was on the ice for Skinner's goal, committing a turnover on a shorthanded 3-on-1 in the neutral zone that led to the Hurricanes' first tally. 

The Bruins went on to allow power play goals on their two other penalties, as Ruutu and Jokinen struck in the second and third periods, respectively. It was the first time the Bruins allowed three power play goals since April 9, 2009, a game against the Canadiens in which Montreal went 3-for-7 on the power play. Tim Thomas said that "messed up situations" were the biggest cause for Carolina's dominance on the man advantage. Whatever the reason, it wasn't pretty. 

Paille did not speak with the media following the game, but he didn't need to for those on hand to understand that Friday's performance was rather uncharacteristic for the Bruins' penalty kill. 

"It's tough to put a finger on it," Marchand, who has two shorthanded goals this season, said of the penalty kill. "Our PK has been one of our strong points. We didn't do our job and that's part of it. You can say there were a couple bounces there, but at the end of the day, we just didn't do our job."

RECCHI GETS HIS DUE

On a positive note, of which there were few on Friday, Mark Recchi was recognized on the home ice for his 1500th point. Recchi's second goal in Wednesday's 3-1 victory over the Panthers gave made him the 1500th player to reach the milestone, and the goal was replayed on the jumbotron in the first period, with a graphic of his career stats following. Fans, coaches, and players from both teams stopped during the TV time-out to clap their hands and tap their sticks on the ice in what was a classy tribute to one of the game's greats. 

"It was obviously very nice," Recchi said following the game. The people here in Boston have been wonderful to me. The organization has been great to me. I have wonderful teammates. It was a great feeling. It's always nice to see people's reaction to that. It's just too bad that we didn't happen to get a big win too to top it off. We have to back on the road again and get wins."

Indeed, the Bruins do. They'll head to Atlanta for a 5 p.m. game against the Thrashers on Sunday, followed by their first visit to Philadelphia since the last season's Eastern Conference semifinals on Wednesday.