T.J. Oshie had a simple answer for what a playoff team should do when it is out of a game: make life miserable for the other side. On Monday, the former Washington Capitals forward, now a full-time analyst, told The Pat McAfee Show that Boston should have turned its Game 4 loss into chaos after the Bruins were beaten 6-1 by the Buffalo Sabres on Sunday.
“You would have liked to maybe see Boston last night – I don’t even care what happens here, you’re out of the game, just start creating havoc,” Oshie said. “This is still hockey here. Just drop the gloves. Start running guys over. Whatever it is. I don’t care what it is. That’s what you’d want to see, right?”
The comments came with Boston already in a deep hole. After Sunday’s loss, the Bruins were down 3-1 in the series, and Buffalo can eliminate them with a win on home ice Tuesday night. The edge in the game turned ugly late when Nikita Zadorov was handed a five-minute major penalty and a 10-minute misconduct for cross-checking Rasmus Dahlin with 3:17 left in regulation, a play that sparked a melee on the ice. The NHL’s Department of Player Safety later fined Zadorov $5,000, the maximum allowed under the collective bargaining agreement.
Oshie, who spent 16 seasons in the NHL with the St. Louis Blues and Capitals, said the mindset in the postseason has to be constant pressure. He played in 106 playoff games, won the Stanley Cup with Washington in 2018 and missed the postseason only three times before retiring in 2024. For him, the message was not about one hit or one fight. It was about sending a message every shift.
“You have to make an impact every time you’re on the ice,” he said. “As a forward, for me, I wanted whatever defenseman I’m going to go against to be petrified that the second he touches the puck, I’m coming full speed and I don’t care what happens. Maybe we both get hurt, it doesn’t matter, but that’s kinda the mentality you have to have in a playoff series, right?”
He also pointed to Tom Wilson as the model. Oshie said teams can use a little of Wilson’s chaos, and the Capitals have benefited from that style in multiple playoff series. Last year, Washington met the Montreal Canadiens in the first round, where Wilson traded verbal barbs with Arber Xhekaj before Game 3, got into a bench brawl with Josh Anderson at the end of the second period in that game and then delivered a devastating hit on Alexandre Carrier in Game 4.
That is the line Oshie was drawing Monday: once a playoff game is slipping away, the best answer, in his view, is not retreat but disruption. Buffalo already has the series lead and the next chance to close it out. Boston, meanwhile, has one night to decide whether it wants the final say to come from skill or from the kind of edge Oshie said the playoffs demand.
