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How did I celebrate turning 26 years old? Well, just like I had imagined: Hacking up a lung and laying in bed, hoping for the sweet release of death. OK, maybe not death, but something close to it. Remember that scene in Robocop where the dude gets covered in acid and then becomes a big bloated blob that nobody wants to touch? Yeah, I think that was me all weekend. (Sorry, friends and family, you’re all about to get very sick from that birthday cake you had me slobber all over.)
But in between Powerades and oranges, along with a 3-1 victory over the New York Islanders on Saturday, it hit me like a Brad Marchand cheapshot to John Tavares’ unsuspecting mug (how in the world did he manage to avoid a suspension for what was an obvious lose-control-of-your life play?): This Bruins team, finally looking healthy, is going to be a lot better than we all probably imagined.
Just take a look at that aforementioned win over the Isles; The Bruins by all means lost their minds in the third period, with Marchand and David Backes both assessed five-minute majors at different points in the period. That forced their young players to stave off a hot Brooklyn squad and their top guns for extended stretches. They responded with a strong penalty kill, and then Jake DeBrusk, fresh off a 17-minute break from his instigator penalty, stormed onto the ice for his first shift and ripped a ridiculously pretty goal through New York’s Jaroslav Halak for the eventual game-winner.
It was yet another perfect moment for the babyfaced Bruins to piss all over themselves. But they didn’t. They instead braced themselves for another white-knuckle, hot-blooded victory.
“You know, we kept our resolve; it’s a good word,” Bruins head Bruce Cassidy said when I asked him about his team’s refusal to break despite the hot tempers. “I thought we were really stiff in the third and our penalty kill has been good all year and we needed it to be tonight in those stretches and we were, like I said, able to draw a penalty on one of the majors. These are games you look back on, when you’re able to kill those for two key guys in our lineup in the third there that we lose for stretches. So, someone else just has to step up and [Sean] Kuraly and [Danton] Heinen played a little more maybe down the stretch and if those two guys are here. So, it’s a good word, I like that.”
Young kids producing at a clip better than we anticipated? DeBrusk, Danton Heinen, and Charlie McAvoy can check that off for me. Tuukka Rask appearing to get his game back on track? Check. And health, with Adam McQuaid and Ryan Spooner the lone pieces needed to return for the Bruins to be at full health for the first time all season, back in frame? Half a check, really. (Both returned to practice on Monday and could be activated sometime within the next week if everything goes well.)
Oh, and the Bruins are in third in the woeful Atlantic, and with four games in hand over the Canadiens, the team they currently hold a two-point advantage heading into Tuesday morning.
It seems rather silly to talk about this kind of stuff in early December, but it’s important in the sense that it’s something the Black and Gold have largely been unable to achieve over their last three seasons or so: It’s a start and impact that’s kept them in control of their own destiny.
“Different guys have stepped up at different times and won games for us,” Marchand acknowledged. “Different lines have done really well and kind of taken control and that’s been the biggest thing. We’ve had a lot of injuries and it’s given guys opportunities and guys have taken advantage of that.”
The Bruins did what they had to do. They survived a nightmare opening two months. Now, with eight wins in their last 10 games and contributions from all four lines, they’re finding a way to thrive.
It almost seems to be a callback to the energy and confidence this team developed when Cassidy first took over for Claude Julien as the team’s head coach last February.
“I do,” Cassidy said when asked if he sees similarities to last year’s hot start and this recent run for the Black and Gold. “And I’m actually getting to know our team now, that we were hoping to ice from the start of the year. So, a bit of it is, the run has to do with having your good players in the lineup every night and they’re playing well, so that makes a coaches job easier.
“We never want to lose the Bruins identity of hard to play against, but we also want to be able to score when we need to and not, if we get behind a goal, not be that team that can’t come back. So, we need to have that built in that we can score and trust ourselves to play good offensive hockey.”
“I feel like we’re playing more of a playoff-style hockey now than we did, say, when [Bruce Cassidy] took over,” David Backes, one of the newest healthy contributors, countered. “Once we got to playoffs this was more of the mandate of getting pucks behind them. Maybe it’s a bit of a shift in systems that a lot of teams are going through. 1-1-3 type or 1-3-1 when they’re clogging up the neutral zone more. There’s no room to slice and dice in the neutral zone, you’ve got to put pucks behind teams and go in there and get pucks low to high and get some net front traffic. Those sorts of pillars to your game, when those are there, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing against it’s tough to play in that type of system when guys are committed to it, and we’ve got a lot of guys committed to it.”
And with that kind of commitment, along with a trash division, I don’t think early December will be the only time you’re going to talk about this team playing some playoff-style hockey.
Ty Anderson is the Boston Bruins beat writer for WEEI.com, and has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010. He can be heard on the Saturday Skate program on 93.7 WEEI (Boston), and has been part of the Boston Chapter of the PHWA since 2013. Contact him on Twitter or send him an email at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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