The Bruins’ 8-1 loss to the Winnipeg Jets was bad. There is no way around that fact.

But the question is, as the B’s ready themselves to continue their five-game road trip in Seattle on Thursday, how big of a bite did the rout take of the team’s growing belief in itself?

Going into Tuesday’s game, the B’s had played nine games since Jim Montgomery was removed and Joe Sacco was installed as head coach, going 7-2 and being competitive in every game.

Tuesday’s defeat was the first lopsided loss since Sacco took over. But it felt so much like some of the bad losses to good teams the B’s had suffered on Montgomery. There were too many penalties and not good enough penalty killing. There was porous slot defense. There was bad goaltending.

And there was a fragility, present in a lot of the losses under Montgomery, that returned for the first time since Sacco took over. It doesn’t matter a lick now, but the Bruins actually started the game well, despite taking a penalty in the first minute. Connor Hellebuyck had to be sharp. But when Brandon Carlo took a double minor midway through the first and the Jets scored on a bad bounce goal – one of the few goals on which Swayman had no chance – the B’s could not regain their footing. By early in the second period, they were down 3-0 and the chance of a comeback was non-existent with Hellebuyck in the net at the other end.

It was a sobering loss, for sure, especially given the fact that much of their confidence was built on playing teams not in the playoff bracket. More importantly, will it be a damaging one? We’ll get a better idea of that on Thursday in Seattle.

But captain Brad Marchand, who was not immune to the team-wide poor play, said he wasn’t too surprised.

“This was coming,” Marchand told reporters in Winnipeg immediately after the game. “Our practices have been sloppy, our execution has been off there and it bleeds into games. How you practice is how you play. It starts there and we haven’t been good enough, so we need to do a better job of being good in practice and it’ll translate into games.”

As Marchand said, there were problems all around. The Mason Lohrei-Andrew Peeke defense pair was minus-3. Marchand himself had a bad turnover on the Jet’s fourth goal that served as the coffin nail. And Jeremy Swayman, whose job it is to cover up at least some of the warts on nights like this, was not good. Again. He allowed a career-high eight goals. His save percentage is now .885 and his GAA is 3.27. That’s not nearly good enough for a player who signed an eight-year, $66 million contract to be a bona fide No. 1 goalie.

Asked if he “feels” for Swayman being left in the whole game (and to be fair, the bottom didn’t truly fall out till he allowed two goals 10 seconds apart in the final four minutes), Marchand wasn’t giving out any passes.

“Not really,” said Marchand. “Everyone had a bad night and he was part of it. He’s not singled out. I don’t think anyone can look at the mirror and say that they had a good game. He’s part of the group, he’s part of the bad loss.”

Where do they go from here? One bad loss – and, yes, we’ll still consider this one loss because it’s the first bad one under Sacco – does not warrant big changes. But if the issues in Winnipeg carry over to Seattle and then Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton? Well, it may soon be time to give 20-year-old Matt Poitras another look. He’s been heating up in Providence, where he now has 3-7-10 totals in 11 games and he’s their best prospect that’s on the cusp.

Beyond that, there’s not much internally the B’s can do. Barring a major trade, they just have to play better. And for their psyche, they could really use a win over a quality opponent. Those have been few in this season that – with each loss to the Winnipegs, Dallases and Carolinas of the league – is increasingly feeling like a transitional one.

And if that’s the determination, then there is not much that would be off the table….

Depending on your perspective of how you viewed the third period fights – and there’s been a lot of criticism for Trent Frederic dropping the gloves with non-fighter David Gustafsson – the B’s did not go down completely without a fight. How much value there is in that moving forward remains to be seen.

“The guys played hard right to the end, that’s all we’re asking,” Sacco told reporters after Wednesday’s practice in Seattle. “We just want to make sure there’s no quit in our game, especially in the third period when things are getting…it’s 4-1, 5-1, we just want to make sure that we’re playing the right way and guys are playing hard.”

Mark Kastelic also went with Logan Stanley and, with the Jets fuming, Nikita Zadorov and captain Adam Lowry went at it…

The Bruins lost a little organizational depth on defense when the Edmonton Oilers claimed Alec Regula from waivers. Regula has been rehabbing a knee injury all season and, now healthy, the B’s had to expose him to waivers to send him to Providence.

Regula, a 24-year-old had been obtained in the salary-clearing Taylor Hall trade with Chicago in the summer of of 2023, had a good season in Providence last year with a plus-36 rating and 4-22-26 totals, though he didn’t get a call-up to Boston.