Bruins find a will and a way
BOSTON –When the Bruins were mired in their season-opening
morass, this was the kind of game they’d find a way to
lose.
Tuesday night at TD Garden, though, the newly surging Bruins
– one of the hottest teams in the NHL right now –
instead found a way to win through guile, grit, and even a little
helping of luck.
Three weeks ago, the Stanley Cup champions were still stumbling
through a 3-7 start that put them last in the league, the worst
start to a post-Cup season since the 1994-95 Rangers went 2-5-1 to
open their title defense. Three weeks ago, the Bruins were losing
games like the Oct. 27 tilt against Montreal, in which Thomas
Plekanec scored the game winner with 9:41 to go despite giving the
B’s a goal off his own stick earlier in the game.
Three weeks later, the Bruins are making positive marks in the
record book. Tuesday night, they dropped the Devils 4-3 for their
sixth straight victory, improving to 9-7-0 and moving to one point
behind eighth-place Ottawa in the Eastern Conference standings. The
34 goals they’ve scored in the last six games is the biggest
offensive explosion by the franchise over such a stretch since the
team posted 35 from Feb. 23 to March 7, 1994.
“I just see the guys committed to winning the game,”
Bruins coach Claude Julien said. “I think (Nathan) Horton hit
the crossbar there at some point in the third, late in the third,
and the guys were just on the edge of their seat on the bench, just
ready to jump up. I think everybody was pretty excited about the
opportunity to win this game, and pretty determined, and
that’s why we came out a better team in the third period. We
didn’t sit back on our heels trying to just salvage a point.
We wanted to win, and we responded properly.”
The game had all the makings of a streak killer. After running
away with the last five wins and scoring in bunches, the Bruins
couldn’t get much going early on, and gave up the
game’s first goal on David Clarkson’s power play strike
midway through the second. Chris Kelly tied it just over four
minutes later, and Brad Marchand delivered the kind of goal that
has been spurring the Bruins to find a higher gear with a breakaway
wrist shot off the opening faceoff of the third period.
But the Devils didn’t break like Ottawa, Toronto, the
Islanders, Edmonton and Buffalo have over the last two weeks. Nick
Palmieri tied it back up at 2 after a failed Bruins clearing
attempt was caught by New Jersey’s Zach Parise at the blue
line. Even after Jordan Caron’s nifty
backwards-between-the-legs pass set up the easiest goal Shawn
Thornton may ever score less than two minutes later, the Devils
again had an answer. Palmieri’s second goal came off a hard
net drive by Adam Henrique that took Tim Thomas out of the
play.
During the days of the purported Cup hangover, the Bruins may not
have been able to find their way out of the woods.
“Probably not, probably some of those bounces don’t go
our way,” Thornton said. “But … hockey is a
different game like that. Sometimes they do and sometimes they
don’t. But of late, things have been going well for us. But
give the guys credit too, because when we were going through that
stretch, we weren’t getting bounces, but guys were really
putting their head down and working as hard as they could to try
and get out of it. Nobody sulked, everybody just worked twice as
hard.”
Every punch the Bruins threw was returned in kind by the Devils to
that point. And yet the hometown team didn’t fold,
didn’t let its efforts diminish, and was rewarded with 3:03
to go, when Joe Corvo picked up the puck off an offensive zone
faceoff, walked along the half boards and waited for a shooting
lane. When he got it, he fired, and though Johan Hedberg made the
stop, Benoit Pouliot was there to swipe at the rebound. He flubbed
the return, but it still found a way past Hedberg to put the Bruins
up for good.
Three weeks ago, maybe Pouliot’s shot wouldn’t have
trickled in. Maybe Horton’s shot off the post, and the
earlier setup that saw him fire from point-blank range into
Hedberg’s chest rather than the gaping net, would have ended
up being frustrating enough to kill the Bruins’ momentum.
Three weeks ago, maybe the Bruins just wouldn’t have found a
way to win this one.
“It seemed like when we were in these games earlier in the
year, we didn’t have the confidence to know that we can win
them,” said Marchand, who responded to a second-period
benching – after his ill-advised roughing penalty led to the
Devils’ first goal – by scoring his lightning strike to
start the third. “Right now, we know that we can win at any
point in the game, and it’s just showing, the
character’s coming out, guys are stepping up and that’s
why we’re able to win at this point.”
After five games in which the Bruins seemed to be having an awful
lot of fun, and scoring an awful lot of goals, the Devils made them
prove they can win a hard-fought 60-minute battle, too.
“I know this is one of the toughest wins that we’ve
had,” said Thomas, who finished with 27 saves.
“Probably the toughest win out of the six games that
we’ve had. They really tested us, they really worked hard,
they really played a good game. We just stayed with it, and we were
the ones that had the ability to turn it on the last 10 minutes,
and were able to pull out the win because of that.
“We’ve had a couple of games where everything went our
way, kind of easier wins, and this was a good wake-up call without
having to pay the price.”
There will be more games like this – in fact, as Thomas said
after the win, the Bruins will probably be in more tight battles
like Tuesday’s than the kinds of runaway victories that
preceded it. The difference is, unlike Oct. 27 against Montreal, or
Oct. 12 at Carolina, or Oct. 10 against Colorado, they’re
finding ways to win the close ones, too.