If we’re going to hand out gold stars for Boston’s tenacious performance over the final 20 minutes of Thursday’s Game 4 victory over the Blue Jackets — I can cut this 1,500-word piece of prose down to just two if we want to cut to the chase.
Tuukka Rask.
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Still here? Alright, then let’s take a deeper dive.
No question, Rask was the Bruins’ best player on the ice on Thursday, turning aside 39 of the 40 shots that came his way — including all nine SOG generated on 8:00 of 5v4 TOI for Columbus. Clinging to a one-goal lead for most of the night, Rask answered the call over the final 20 minutes of regulation — stopping 13 shots, including four on the Jackets’ lone power play of the stanza — to close out the win and even the best-of-seven series at 2-2.
Boston’s netminder might steal most of the headlines, and for good reason — as will Patrice Bergeron’s two-goal effort on what has still been a shaky at best showing from Boston’s top power-play unit.
But on a Bruins team that has won six playoff games off of game-winning goals from six different players, it was yet another win punctuated by contributions off the box score and plenty of in-game shuffling from Boston’s bench boss in Bruce Cassidy.
Here’s a look at a couple of unsung heroes and under-the-radar moves from Boston that helped the B’s put a cork in that blasted cannon at Nationwide Arena.
1. David Backes takes his lumps, and made Columbus play
When Cassidy opted to deploy Backes back in the B’s lineup after a five-game layoff this postseason, it seemed like the logical next step to get Boston’s offense back on track against Sergei Bobrovsky.
With Boston’s average shot distance through three playoff matchups against Bobrovsky measuring out at 39 feet, the B’s needed a big body down low to alter shots, pot rebounds from in close and — at the very least — recover pucks and feed them back out before big bodies like Seth Jones or David Savard could scoop them up.
It’s a tough gig, but somebody’s gotta do it — although Backes did find himself knocked out of the game at 12:30 in the opening period after Dean Kukan caught him in the face with an elbow.
It’s always a stomach-churning sight when a player with a history of concussions like Backes is clocked up high, but the veteran returned to the contest and returned to scraping down low in front of Bobrovsky.
While he didn’t tip any pucks home in the third period, his positioning — fighting down low with Savard near the midway point in the frame — put him in the right spot to fish a puck out from along the end boards and cast it back up to the blue line to extend a stretch of O-zone possession. Recovering said puck allowed
Zdeno Chara
to blast a point shot wide that ricocheted off the boards and created a bunch of trouble for Savard and Bobrovsky at the netfront.
Unable to corral the biscuit, both Bobrovsky and Savard had little time to react to
Sean Kuraly
waiting in the low slot, as he fired one home from 12 feet out to give Boston a 3-1 lead and finally provide a bit of breathing room for Rask down the other end of the ice.
If Boston’s going to get pucks past an athletic netminder like Bobrovsky, it’s going to need to generate chances from a lot closer than 39 feet. The B’s two third-period tallies on Thursday (an average of nine feet out from Columbus’ net), is a step in the right direction.
(The Bruins will take those kinds of looks down low from Kuraly, methinks.)
2. Brandon Carlo protects the house
It wasn’t a walk in the park for Rask on the Blue Jackets’ four stints on the power play — as he had to face nine total shots on goal and six total scoring chances through 8:00 of 5v4 play.
But if you ask the B’s netminder — the quantity of chances for the opposition often takes a backseat to the quality of said looks. And so far this postseason, a Blue Jackets power play that cashed in on 38.1 percent of its chances entering Thursday’s matchup has made teams pay from rebounds in tight.
In both of Columbus’ victories over the B’s in Games 2 and 3, the game-winning tallies were both notched on the power play — with
Matt Duchene’
s tallies buried from an average distance of 9.5 feet away from Rask.
Preventing pucks from skittering around the blue paint and bouncing off of bodies down low was going to be a priority for Boston’s penalty kill in Game 4, and Carlo — often situated to Rask’s right — was there to sweep any pucks out of danger in a hurry in what was a perfect 4-for-4 showing from the B's PK.
(A quick stick from Carlo prevents a bouncing feed from Duchene from causing any issues down low.)
“
I don't think they got too many rebound opportunities,” Rask said. “That's how they've been scoring. They were trying to play down low a little bit more. Push some pucks in there, but I thought we protected the house well.
3. Cassidy sticks with his top guns on the power play
David Pastrnak
had a bit of an odd day at the rink. Boston’s top sniper has been stuck in a rut for most of the postseason, prompting Cassidy to even start him in a bottom-six role at the start of Game 3.
With
David Krejci
earning reps at the elbow and No. 88 spending more time contained along the half wall with a second PP unit featuring a pair of defensemen up top in
Charlie McAvoy
and
Matt Grzelcyk
, it became clear: Cassidy was not going to let Pastrnak’s repeated fumblings with the puck cost the B’s on a shorthanded tally — especially with the Jackets already generating a pair of high-danger scoring chances on the PK through the first two periods of play.
“W
e made the switch on the power play, I thought, Krech had played on there, Pasta was out for five weeks, and our power play didn't take a hit,” Cassidy said. “He's good over there, more of a passer than shooter and right now, we weren't getting that many shots from the elbow, so Krech is good at chucking it into the bumper to Bergy or maybe some tips, we went that route.
”
It’s still evident that Pastrnak isn’t operating at his best, especially when it comes to puck control, but it doesn’t look like Cassidy is going to keep the young winger off the top unit for any extended stretches going forward. Despite their up-and-down play, a combination of Bergeron + Pastrnak is still generating 35 scoring chances and 17 high-danger looks in 30:19 of 5v4 TOI this postseason. The chances are going to be there.
“H
e's a proud guy,” Cassidy said of Pastrnak. “You're talking again about, what is he? 22, 23. He's a young guy that's still going through some of that maturity process and learning how to compete this time of year. He's got good players around him to help him through it. He's got the trust of his coaching staff.
“So we're going to allow him to play through it. … We may limit certain situations because we're trying to win, but at the end of the day, we got a lot of faith in David and hopefully, it just keeps getting better for him."
