It took Vancouver goaltender Roberto Luongo just two shots to remind him where he was.

The TD Garden. Boston, Massachusetts. The city that haunted and taunted the veteran netminder and Olympian throughout the Canucks’ failed bid at the 2011 Stanley Cup, and did so once again in its crack at the 34-year-old since June 2011. Boston struck 5:12 into the night when Milan Lucic potted his 16th of the year on the B’s second shot of the night, and never looked back, downing Luongo and what’s left of the battered Canucks by a 3-1 final in Boston.

“I think this one’s 100% on me. I wasn’t too good out there tonight,” Luongo said after the Canucks loss, their fifth in a row. “Wasn’t tracking well, my reads were off. I think I made a big mistake last night and we got in late so I didn’t skate this morning and I just didn’t feel like myself out there so disappointing performance for me here. I thought the guys deserved better.”

Considering what was in front of him tonight -- with the Vancouver blue-line headlined by injuries to Kevin Bieksa, Chris Tanev, and now Dan Hamhuis -- Luongo wasn’t the reason that his club lost tonight, but just couldn’t come up with the timely saves they needed.

Something that head coach John Tortorella noted after the game.

“To me, the game changes, we need another big offensive play. [Daniel Sedin] has a chance to make that. I think we need another save from [Luongo]. I don’t think one person determines winning or losing a game, but that to me is the game tonight,” said Tortorella. “I think both teams are pretty much even in chances: we don’t get one or two more big offensive plays and we don’t get one of two saves, they do and that’s where we’re that. I appreciate Lou saying that, but this is a team thing here that we’re going through and we’ll go through it together.”

Boston would jump out to a 2-0 edge behind a Jarome Iginla power play goal beginning with a huge shorthanded save by Tuukka Rask at the other end, and that’s just how it goes.

“You see it a lot in this game. You see a save at one end, and it ends up in the net at the other end,” Boston coach Claude Julien said of the sequence. “It’s something you see quite a bit, not something you like to see, but something that happens a fair amount of times in this league.”

The Canucks wouldn’t go down without a fight in the middle frame, as Raphael Diaz put home his first as a Canuck (in his first game with the club) 11:28 into the second, but failed to build off it in the form of another goal when yet another break didn’t go their way. Absolutely pulverizing the B’s in their own zone, a quick grasp of possession from Johnny Boychuk away from Vancouver gave No. 55 the sight of Danny Paille at the Canucks’ blue-line, and put the puck on Paille’s stick with nobody-but-Luongo in his way. The result? A 3-1 edge for Boston.



Striking with his eighth of the season, and giving the B’s a two-goal edge, it was the moment that completely flipped this game in Boston’s favor given the way that the Canucks were swarming Rask and company in search of the game-tying goal just mere moments prior.

“Well, I mean some nights we get those breaks and some nights we don’t, they end up in the back of your net,” Julien admitted after the win, the Bruins’ 22nd in 30 home games this year. “But that was, again, a pass by Johnny, and to have his head up there when he got the puck in his stick and Piesy read it right away, came up the bench and when he saw that we had control of it, instead of skating into the play he just stretched himself out and it was a big goal obviously at that time.”

Handling all of Vancouver’s nine third period shots, and holding the Canucks to nothing on a lifeless power play late in the third, Rask and the B’s hung on, earning their first post-Cup victory over the Canucks, something that eluded them in their previous two attempts (Jan. 7, ‘12 and Dec. 14, ‘13).

For the B’s, beating the Canucks may not have meant a lot, especially given the state of the two franchises since their epic seven-game showdown almost three years ago, but a continued ability to see contributions from Player 1 to Player 20 has been something the B’s can hang their hat on.

Especially after a night like Johnny Boychuk’s, where he decimated everybody in sight.

“In this building here, anytime our team comes up with a big, clean hit, it really gets the crowd into the game, and it really picks up your team,” Julien said of Boychuk’s physicality on a night where he finished with three hits and a blocked shot in 24:04 of ice time. “That’s for anybody I think, and that’s the way we play the game. We like to play a heavy game, and Johnny was at his best here tonight.”

From a Vancouver scope, it’s tough to lose five in a row, and it’s undoubtedly harder when one of those losses comes against a rival like the B’s, but the effort’s there. And that means a whole lot for a Canucks club that’s absolutely crippled with injuries. That’s an undeniable truth for Tortorella.

“Well I think as the past couple of games you can see more structure coming into our game. Defensively I thought we were making more plays instead of slopping the puck around. I thought for the most part were some of the things, with our lineup and where we’re banged up I thought we defended fairly well for most of the game,” Tortorella noted, adding, “I’m not interested in moral victories and all that, we lose another game, but as a coach I have to try to hang my hat on, I see some improvement within our club within our structure of a lot of different areas of our game.”

With all their injuries, Vancouver’s most tenured defensemen, Jason Garrison, has played 295 games at the NHL level. The second most tenured d-man, Diaz, has played in 129. That’s not an excuse, but rather the reality of the Canucks’ situation. They’re giving everything they can in their first year with the fiery Tortorella behind the bench, and he knows that.

“We don’t win, but I don’t have a complaint because I thought our team gave everything they had. This is a club that is tattered as far as injuries. I’m not using it as an excuse, but I also have to be a realist on how I go about my business with them,” he said after the game. “Other players that have been here that have more experience they’ll be handled differently because I do think we need more from a number of people in certain areas, but as a group tonight as a team I thought we improved in a lot of areas and I thought we gave some really good efforts. Third period I just think it just looks like we just can’t amp it up for the full sixty and is that because of the lineup or is that because we just don’t know how to do it, we’re still trying to search through that and figure it out.”

With the victory, the Bruins improve to 7-2-1 in their last ten games, and have now outscored opponents 9o-to-54 in 30 games at TD Garden this season.

Up next

The Bruins head to St. Louis to take on the dominant Blues. With 37 wins and 80 points on the year, the Blues are pound-for-pound one of the best teams in the league, and without Zdeno Chara on the point, there’s no way of denying that the B’s are in for a long night against a team that’s won 20 of 28 home contests if they don’t get a complete 60-minute effort.

And even that might not be enough, really.

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