The real Bruins show up on time vs. Hurricanes in Game 1 of playoffs

The Bruins looked downright awful in their three-game round robin. They managed just four goals in the three games and never led a single game. The vaunted top line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak, which managed all of one assist in the three games, looked particularly out of sorts.

What was even more maddening to some was that the B’s seemed to care not an iota about the top seeding they gave away. Marchand, in fact, went so far as to refer to the round-robin games as “preseason games.” Nothing to worry about folks, they seemed to be saying, we’ll show up when the games matter.

Well, for one day at least, the B’s earned the right to say, ‘We told ya so!”

Their Game 1 victory over the Carolina Hurricanes on Wednesday was not an easy one. It went to double overtime. But the B’s were better than the Canes throughout the contest and, to further calm the Black and Gold waters back home in Boston, it was the Bergeron line that won the day for the B’s.

The uber-talented trio started the Bruins’ scoring with a Bergeron-to-Marchand-to-Pastrnak strike that erased an early lead by Carolina, and then ended it with a Marchand-to-Pastrnak-to-Bergeron dagger at 1:13 of double overtime to give the Bruins a 4-3 victory, their first since March 10.

Coach Bruce Cassidy had expressed confidence, sometimes passionately, in his team and top line throughout the round-robin struggles. It may have been reassuring for him to see the combo start to click in Game 1, but Cassidy would not go so far as to say he was relieved. He knows the players too well.

“Relief is not the right word in my estimation. These guys are battle-tested,” said Cassidy. “We’ve got a lot of trust in those guys. We have discussions. Where’s your game at? And don’t forget Pasta missed what a lot of teams went through, the training camp. Even though they’ve played together a long time, it’s been four months and change. Now you’re coming into a part of the season that’s high stakes. I don’t know if rust is the right word, but we knew it would take some time for them to make some little plays. And overtime is them. The faceoff play was them. They missed a little bit of that in the round robin. Now they know that there is a little more at stake as well. Put those two factors together and we knew they’d be there and competing. And competing at a high level. And when they do that, they’re so talented and smart that they know things are going to happen for them. And they did.”

The first goal was a quickly manufactured work of art. Bergeron won a faceoff straight back to Marchand, who retrieved it at the top of the left circle and wheeled toward the net. Pastrnak, lined up for the draw on the board side of the circle, lost Jaccob Slavin on his sprint across the ice to the right side of the cage and buried Marchand’s feed.

On the winner, Marchand and Pastrnak played a give-and-go through the neutral zone with Pastrnak occupying the middle of the ice. Pastrnak got a step on Slavin again and, when Joel Edmundson came over to help, the young superstar slipped a backhand pass through the big defenseman for the wide-open Bergeron, who finished off the game with a perfect far-side shot to beat goalie Petr Mrazek.

It was a play deserving of the old chef’s kiss, and one we’d become accustomed to seeing from this trio. They’ve put too many pucks behind the goalie to fret too much over “preseason” games.

“We were confident,” said Bergeron. “We’re a confident group, a confident line. I think we got better as we went on in the round robin. Obviously, you want more, you want to keep getting better and taking the next step, especially when we thought that this was a really important game, starting round one, so we had to put whatever was behind us in the past and get some rhythm going.”

The B’s are not out of the woods, obviously. This Carolina team is not only better than it was last year — Brady Skjei and Vincent Trocheck are impactful deadline pickups — but they appear that, with another season under their belts, they are mentally tougher. The B’s took leads in the second and third periods only to see the Canes tie it. Last year, that team wilted under duress.

And, no, the Bruins are not all the way back to the form that made them Presidents’ Trophy winners. As expected here, the will (for the most part) returned. They blocked 30 shots, including five from Joakim Nordstrom, which is a big part of his game, and four from Pastrnak, which tells you that this is the playoffs. The skill part, however, is still a work in progress. Too many plays either ended up with a missed shot or simply died on the vine.

But the Bruins were the better team in Game 1, both in overall play and on the scoreboard, and more than a few people doubted that that would be the case.

Whatever, seemed to be the collective response.

“I don’t think we pay too much attention to the outside noise and what other people think of what the outcomes are going to be. They’re not the ones playing,” said Charlie Coyle, who had one of the four goals. “We’re going to control what we can control and that’s inside our locker room, what we’ve got on that ice there. We’ll just take it one day at a time and we have great leadership that leads the way and keeps our mindset right going into each game. We win that first one, which is huge. But it’s just one and we still have a long series ahead, so we’ll be prepared for that.”

If they say they’re prepared for a long series, who are we to doubt them?

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3aiUIJP