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Wednesday’s Game 1 between the Bruins and Senators lived up to its billing.
You expected it to be tight-checking. It was. You expected a low-scoring night. Yup. You knew that the Bruins were going to get bogged down by Ottawa’s clog-it-up style. Oh, were they ever. But in the end, the Bruins delivered with a come from behind 2-1 victory over the Sens to take a 1-0 series lead.
In a start that was anything but boring, the Bruins and Senators traded blow for blow, and it was Craig Anderson and Tuukka Rask that traded save for save, with the 30-year-old Rask coming up with massive stops on Bobby Ryan while David Pastrnak was denied by Anderson just moments earlier.
Even after a Pastrnak breakaway and Derick Brassard breakaway separated by mere seconds, it was the play of the two playoff-tested netminders that kept this game scoreless through 20 minutes.
But when Ryan took advantage of a speed mismatch in the middle period, and blazed through Zdeno Chara and Adam McQuaid for his first goal of the playoffs, scored 10:28 into the middle period, the B’s were thrown back into the trouble of solving Guy Boucher’s patented neutral-zone trap.
And, well, it was a failed test.
For the full 20 minutes of their middle frame, the Bruins were held without a shot on goal. Not one! And from the Ryan goal on, it was a complete disaster, as the Senators out-attempted the Bruins 19-to-1. It was the B’s first shotless second period since 1939, and it was the first time that the Senators had held a team without a shot on goal for a full playoff period in their franchise’s history.
Against a goalie they had beaten for just one even-strength goal all season long, finding a way to score two on Anderson, especially with the power play posting zeros, didn’t seem like a hill, but rather a mountain that the chemistry-befallen Bruins forward corps could not climb.
But the tides changed when Frank Vatrano rifled a puck home at the 4:55 mark of the third period, and the Bruins found their legs. And led by the Patrice Bergeron line, they went to work.
With a dominating puck-possession game, they hemmed the Senators in for an extended stretch, battling their own fatigue to further expose a winded Ottawa group, before the puck pinballed with tremendous precision from Brad Marchand to Pastrnak to Bergeron and then back to Marchand for the 28-year-old’s wide open look at Anderson’s yawning cage. And despite a two-game ban for his spear in the 80th game of the regular season, Marchand showed no signs of rust and did not miss.
The night wasn’t complete without a few more highlight-quality saves from Rask, though, as he finished with a point-blank stop with just seconds left in a 26-of-27 winning effort.
This and that
- Down David Krejci, who was a late scratch because of an upper-body injury, the Bruins went back to load-up mindset with David Pastrnak reunited with Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron.
This line has been a machine whenever assembled this season and last night was no exception. The Bergeron line straight-up dined on the Pageau line and Cody Ceci-Dion Phaneuf pairing, and it was their ability to control the puck that really allowed the Bruins to hang around in a game that was largely dictated by Ottawa’s run over the rest of the B’s rather ineffectiveness and messy-looking line combinations. It will be interesting to see if Guy Boucher continues to deploy those five skaters against them in Game 2, or if he decides to go strength on strength and put Erik Karlsson out there.
The Bruins, by the way, hope that Krejci’s issue will clear up by Saturday’s Game 2. Krejci played in all 82 games this season, and ranked third among Bruins in goals (23) and points (54).
- Charlie McAvoy. Whoa, baby. It’s hard to picture the last time that an actual teenage defenseman stepped into the fire of the Stanley Cup Playoffs (with zero games of prior NHL experience) and played such a major role in his team’s victory, simply because it just doesn’t happen all that often. But McAvoy delivered in Game 1, with 24:11 of time on ice (the second-most among Bruins skaters), and with the poise and steady offensive mind that helped make him the 14th overall pick last June.
“I thought he was terrific,… Bruins interim coach Bruce Cassidy said. “19-year-old kid comes in, never played a game in the National Hockey League. He had composure, saw the ice, defended well, got his kind of indoctrination over early when he tried to dump one in, hit our guy and it came back. Other than that, I thought he was pretty good, stayed out of trouble, and we needed it, we needed it.…
Still down Brandon Carlo (upper-body) and Torey Krug (lower-body), McAvoy’s role could grow even more if the Bruins are forced to skate without puck-moving defenseman Colin Miller, who was injured in a knee-on-knee hit in the second period, for the next game of this series.
- A player that won’t get the credit he should for his game on Wednesday? Dominic Moore. The veteran Moore won a battle behind the net and immediately parked himself in front of the net on the Frank Vatrano goal, and absorbed a massive asskicker of a hit from Mark Borowiecki to make the play. Moore also drew a penalty to put an end to an Ottawa power play just 16 seconds into it, won four of six battles at the faceoff dot (all in the defensive zone), and finished the night with a blocked shot. These are the kind of efforts that have carved out Moore’s reputation as a legitimate playoff threat.
Up next
The B’s have a longish layoff before it’s Game 2 at the Canadian Tire Center on Saturday afternoon. A Bruins win would give them a 2-0 series lead heading back to Boston for a Marathon Monday contest at the Garden. Since 2009, Bruins are 4-1 in series in which they’ve taken a 2-0 series lead.
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), can also be found in the New England Hockey Journal magazine, 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.