The Boston Bruins are starting to develop a bad habit.

For the second night in a row, the Bruins found themselves in a 2-0 first period hole. They also allowed the next goal in both Wednesday’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Washington Capitals and Thursday’s 4-2 loss to Colorado Avalanche.

The Bruins were fortunate enough in Washington to erase the Capitals’ three-goal lead to force overtime to earn a hard-fought point. Unfortunately for the Black and Gold, they couldn’t muster up their second comeback in as many nights.

Sure, playing an 8:00 P.M. nationally televised “Wednesday Night Rivalry” game on the road the night before is not going to help you the following evening, but Bruins’ captain Zdeno Chara wasn’t buying into that notion.

“It shouldn’t be an excuse, everybody has a tough schedule, everybody is facing at some point tough road trips as far as time wise and travel wise,” Chara said following the loss to the lowly Avs. “I think it was more about us making a bit more mistakes than they did. For sure they came out to play. They were ready to play us and they were a better team especially in the first 20.”

Thursday’s first period was a tale of two different Bruins teams. Although they were arguably the better team five-on-five against the Avalanche in the period, four-on-four or five-on-four the Bruins looked lost. They were making blind passes, they were standing around watching the play happen and also had issues keeping the puck in the attacking zone.

Thanks to a couple of mistakes with one coming four-on-four and another while the Black and Gold were on the power play, Torey Krug and the Bruins found themselves in another two-goal deficit at the first intermission.

“If I keep that in their guys are extremely tired and we have the ability to make some plays against a tired group,”said Krug, who fumbled the puck at the blueline allowing Nathan MacKinnon to race in all alone. “Unfortunately, I didn’t make a play and maybe that’s a learning moment for me early in my career that I move on from and maybe next time I don’t go and dive for that and maybe make a solid play to collect the puck and go in on the attack.”

Thanks to the red-hot David Pastrnak’s team-leading 17th and 18th goals of the season, the Bruins were able to cut the Colorado lead to one with just under seven minutes to go in the middle stanza. But their one-goal deficit was short lived as former Bruin Carl Soderberg gave the Avalanche some breathing room with just his fourth goal of the season.

As resilient as the Bruins were Wednesday night to earn a point, and as hard they battled in the second period on Thursday to get themselves back into the game, everyone in the locker room knows they need to start doing a better job in the opening 20 minutes.

“I think I would have like to seen us be a little bit smarter then that. You know until you can find your legs you got to be smart and we weren’t,” said head coach Claude Julien. “We gave up some soft goals and certainly dug ourselves a hole there, that was hard to come back.”

Next up for the Bruins is a match-up with the Toronto Maple Leafs Saturday night at TD Garden. You may remember the Bruins found themselves down 3-0 after three Leafs goals in the games first 13:13 when the teams last met on October 15th in Toronto. The Bruins will obviously hope for better first period results this time around.