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I thought the craziest part of my weekend was going to be watching two grown men almost come to actual, physical blows during a viewing of “Stars Wars: The Last Jedi… on Friday. (Seriously, hear one man want to fight another man for telling him to be quiet during a movie and nothing about your life will never make any sense. Like, ever again.) But somehow, thanks to Saturday’s bizarrely timed but highly-entertaining tilt between the Bruins and Rangers at TD Garden, I was wrong.
It was in this game that I saw Michael Grabner bank a puck off glass, Tuukka Rask’s back, and then his skate, into the Boston net for the first goal of the afternoon. It was in this game that I saw the Bruins go from not knowing how to run a breakout to scoring two goals in less than nine minutes against Henrik Lundqvist. And it was in that game that I saw the Bruins unsuccessfully try to get away with two different too many men on the ice penalties, only to fall by a 3-2 final in overtime.
“It was all three actually – we’re scrambling to get on the ice, so the call might have been from, like, [Charlie] McAvoy jumping for [Torey] Krug, it might have been [David Krejci] going for [Patrice Bergeron]. I don’t know. I can’t complain, I mean, we’re trying to gain an advantage there,… Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy said of the late-game calls against his club. “Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don’t. We didn’t. And the other one was on the power play; we had a forward jump for the wrong guy. I mean, we had six guys. So, it’s hard to complain about them. We were at fault there, we’ll take the blame for that and unfortunately it’s a lousy way to lose, but we had some chances in overtime too, we just lost our footing on a couple too. It was one of those nights.
“It seemed like we had some chances at the offensive blue line, even in overtime, [and] we just lost control of pucks and lost our footing and took away some good chances for us.…
But still, it was enough for the Bruins to steal a point -- and in improbable fashion, too -- as the Rangers entered the third period protecting a one-goal lead and with a 10-0-0 record on the season when leading after two periods. Their perfect record is this regard is still very much intact, sure, but this was as good a fight as the Bruins could have given. And it’s becoming the norm, really.
“The second period you fold down two-nothing and there was a period where we weren’t at our best and we battled back,… Rask said. “This team has shown a lot of character coming back from deficits.…
“I always tend to look positives,… said Cassidy. “I think it’s too long a year to always dwell on the things that didn’t go well. You’ve got to correct those. Some of them I think were self-inflicted with the penalties, obviously. Some of our puck play, we forced plays. That’s not structure, that’s just poor decisions, and I thought we had a lot of giveaways and it showed in the stats. Having said that, when you’re down two-nothing, it’s not easy to come back in this league against a good team, and we did.…
This and that
- Don’t let the power-play goal fool you -- this was a terrible night for the Bruins’ power-play units.
“Early on, I thought the pressure in zone, we weren’t able to handle it,… Cassidy said of his power play, which finished the night 1-for-7 in about 12 minutes of work in total. “They were more aggressive on the kill than we were ready for and we just did not handle it well. We had a couple plays in mind we thought might work down low around the net and I think we forced the puck on those down by the goal line, so we spent a lot of time going back into our own end and breaking the puck out, which becomes frustrating. We tried to run a delayed play tonight; we were out of sync on it. So, there was problems getting into the zone and there was problems in the zone.
“There [were] problems, I mean, whoever watched the game clearly – I mean, we struggled on the power play. We’re not going to hide from that, but it got us a goal later, so we eventually kind of got it squared away but we certainly had opportunities early to take advantage and we didn’t.…
- Just an unbelievable atmosphere at the Garden for this game. You had what felt like all of Manhattan in Boston and supporting the Rangers, and it created a truly playoff-like atmosphere, completing with dueling “Let’s go Bruins… and “Let’s go Rangers… chants from the crowd. You just don’t get many of these games anymore, really, and it felt like a trip in the wayback machine back to 2008.
“It was pretty cool,… Marchand admitted when asked of the dueling chants. “I don’t think I’ve seen that too many times in an arena. A lot of Rangers fans came in, I would say. That was pretty cool. We were laughing a little bit on the bench. Definitely makes it fun to play out there.…
- A season-low 7:43 of time on ice for Jake DeBrusk tonight. The first-year NHLer finished the night with two shots on goal, but was also credited with three giveaways. Those games will happen.
Up next
The Bruins will have a light skate on Sunday morning and get back to work with a Monday home game against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Always a good game between these two teams, it seems.
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.