Loss aside, Bruins did enough good to be encouraged for Game 2
Bruins #Bruins
Playoff hockey delivers again.
Saturday night’s Game 1 between the Bruins and Capitals didn’t end the way the Bruins wanted, not when Nic Dowd deflected T.J. Oshie’s shot past Tuukka Rask for a 3-2 overtime win for the home team. But as one of those helmet-flying, stick-breaking, bodies-colliding kind of nights, the intensity of the NHL’s tournament was on full display, the first game of the entire postseason breaking out of the gate like those horses over at Pimlico had done just a few hours earlier.
The early action was ferocious and physical, just as predicted. And the drama that came with it could have been penned by the scriptwriters. All-world forward Alex Ovechkin delivering the game’s first big hit, flattening David Krejci. Resident bad boy Tom Wilson scoring the first goal for the Caps, a painful reminder there’s a pretty skilled and dangerous player behind that tough guy facade. Old friend-turned-foe Zdeno Chara using every cell of his 44-year-old body and every inch of his 6-foot 9-inch frame to poke that extra-long stick into the Bruins’ business.
Though the game would find some equilibrium after the torrid start, the Bruins’ offense never really found its rhythm, the top line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak working so hard just to get possession that they did precious little with it once they had it. With goals coming instead from Jake DeBrusk and Nick Ritchie, the second on the power play, and with each of them tying the score at the time, the Bruins found themselves playing from behind most of the night. That was particularly unfortunate given they played most of the game against backup goaltender Craig Anderson, the veteran who had to step in late in the first period when Vitek Vanecek left after injuring himself doing a split.
But for any small pangs of regret over opportunity lost, the Bruins did a lot of good things Saturday, hanging tough on the ice and on the road, getting a relatively good start from goaltender Rask, whose three mistakes all involved some sort of deflection, none stranger than the final one, which managed to bounce off his own chest before slipping into the goal.
In other words, the pre-series question posed by Charlie McAvoy still rings true.
“Why not us?”
Why not indeed.
These Bruins should have enough gas in the tank for a long run, which is why coach Bruce Cassidy wasn’t about to sound any alarm bells after the game. As he looks ahead, there is so much the Bruins can do better.
“Well we hung around certainly, they were physical early on and we battled through that,” Cassidy said. “Our top guys didn’t seem to have it. Couldn’t find ice. Give Washington credit. We couldn’t escape pressure on the power play and find the open guy. A lot of those guys doing a lot of scoring for us weren’t able to get to their game tonight, get the puck to cooperate, to support each other, generate enough offense. Other than that, not really typical of what we’ve seen from that group so hopefully Game 2, they’re a little sharper.”
They have the pieces. Rask is a stalwart and even-keeled vet who won’t be rattled by one loss, and he is backed by a rising young star in Jeremy Swayman, who seems ready should Rask run into any back trouble. The trade deadline acquisition of forward and former league MVP Taylor Hall couldn’t have gone better, giving the Bruins two top lines to give defenses headaches, forcing them to choose their poison against an offense that built a late-season surge on finding its 5-on-5 scoring touch. They are more physically prepared than past years to deal with the Capitals, even with their former captain Chara on the other side of the ice, and they are calm in the shadow of current captain Bergeron.
The Stanley Cup remains Boston’s best championship hope, since the Super Bowl, World Series and NBA championship feel so far away.
“It’s not really something that really crosses my mind, sizing us up to the other sports franchises in Boston, that’s not something I do or anybody else does, I worry about our team, worry about myself,” McAvoy said this week. “There’s only so much you can kind of fit in that head. I worry about the team, and we have a great team. I love this group. I feel really great about us – it’s kind of ‘why not us?’
“If we can get hot in the playoffs, that’s all it takes to get on a run.”
The Bruins didn’t quite get their temperature high enough Saturday, but as opening games go, it was still a pretty good appetizer.
“We were just kind of predictable where the puck was going,” Cassidy said. “As a result we ended up working really really hard just to get possession of it. … They were hard early, Krejci got drilled by Ovechkin. But he bounced back and I thought we responded as the game went on. At the end of the day it became more of your typical hockey game.”
One that felt like the real playoffs, where 5,000 fans in the building could be heard through the television screens chanting their disappointing with the officiating, where one late stretch of five-plus minutes of penalty-free hockey was contested around the torn-off helmets and broken stick pieces littering the ice, where overtime felt like the only appropriate way to settle the final score.
The Bruins were on the wrong side in the extra period, but as the action moves towards Game 2 on Monday, opportunity still awaits.