The Boston Bruins easily could have pounded the snooze button headed into the “bye” week and NHL All-Star break.
The B’s have built up plenty of room for error at the top spot in the Atlantic Division and the Eastern Conference, and they’ve really hit their stride with a 12-2-3 record since the Christmas holiday break. So it would have been very easy for Bruins players to begin letting their mind wander to their planned vacation trips to the Bahamas, or to lose focus while gearing up for NHL All-Star week in Toronto.
The Bruins maybe even did that for the first 10 minutes of Saturday afternoon’s matinee at the Wells Fargo Center, which could have been a prime setting to get vacation started early without another scheduled NHL game for 10 days.
But it was their big-time, game-breaking All-Star in David Pastrnak that snapped the Bruins out of it and opened the scoring in an eventual 6-2 win over the Flyers that made them the first NHL team crossing the 70-point mark this season. Pastrnak finished with two goals and three points, Linus Ullmark was stellar making 12 saves in the first period while the B’s were finding their footing and James van Riemsdyk and Charlie McAvoy also finished with multi-point games for the Black and Gold.
“That's what you want in that last game [before the NHL All-Star break]," said Charlie Coyle, who scored his 18th goal of the season to close out the scoring after Philly tried to make a game out of it. "You know what's right around the corner, but you make sure we focus, do all the right things, create our good habits still. You feel much better going into a break when you have a solid game. You win like that, you get to enjoy your break a little more."
Pastrnak was the one that set the tone, though. He was scoring, winning battles down low and teaming Pavel Zacha and van Riemsdyk to be a very effective 5-on-5 line that the Flyers simply didn’t have an answer for. It was exactly the kind of statement that Pastrnak has made over and over this season as a more influential leader that’s consistently executing at an explosive level most NHL players could never dream of achieving.
The goals are obviously Pastrnak’s calling card, but he was just as impressive fighting through defenders to push a pass toward the net-front where van Riemsdyk scored his goal at the start of the second period following Boston’s four goal outburst in the first.
"He's a game-breaker, right? And he gives us an advantage that, in close games, we can win them,” said Jim Montgomery of Pastrnak, who sits behind just Sam Reinhart and Auston Matthews in the goals-scored category among NHL players. "I actually thought the Flyers were significantly better than us the first 10 minutes of the game, but our big-time players made some big-time plays, including our goaltender, who was spectacular.”
Perhaps most impressively, the Bruins are learning lessons from the speed bumps they do encounter this season. They did not handle the games ahead of the three-day holiday break well while slumping hard offensively and losing five of the final six games headed into Christmas.
The question was whether the B’s would experience the same kind of slippage again ahead of a scheduled “bye” week and the NHL All-Star break, particularly after suffering a disappointing loss to the Carolina Hurricanes at home ahead of the road trip. The Bruins answered that resoundingly with a character road win over the Senators on Thursday night followed by a resounding blowout victory over the Flyers this weekend.
Now the Boston Bruins can scatter to sunny locales all over the world for a few days of rest and relaxation amidst a cushy schedule in the middle of the season that should allow the B’s to maintain their momentum when they get back to business more than a week from now.
ONE TIMERS
1. What a weekend for college hockey with Boston College and Boston University meeting for the first time in their long rivalry as the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked college hockey teams in the country. I was at sold out Kelley Rink on Friday night and that’s as raucous an atmosphere as I’ve ever been at for a college hockey game with the BC fans obviously going home happy. It’s just great to see both the Eagles and Terriers back where they belong at the top of the pack, and with NHL first-round picks scattered all over the ice, after they’d gone through some years of difficulty coming out of the end of the Jerry York and Jack Parker eras at the schools.
Gearing up for the rematch between #1 BU and #2 BC, tonight at 7 p.m. at a sold-out Agganis Arena with @jimmyconnelly on @NESN 🏒
— Tyler Murray (@LT__Murray) January 27, 2024
Needless to say, the teams (and the fans) have a tough act to follow after last night. What an atmosphere at Conte Forum! pic.twitter.com/IdXKtPYMi5
2. Nobody is tougher than hockey players. Look at Brandon Carlo’s face after catching a deflected puck in Saturday afternoon’s 6-2 win where he finished out the shift, and then finished out the game after checking to make sure all of his teeth were still intact.
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) January 27, 2024
3. 16 wins in a row for the Edmonton Oilers is some kind of impressive run. They have matched the Columbus Blue Jackets team back in 2016-17 and sit just one win away from matching the NHL record set by the 1992-93 Pittsburgh Penguins. Anytime you can do anything that’s going to match the 1992-93 Penguins you are doing something pretty good indeed. I can’t wait for the hot take specialists to ask if the Oilers are peaking too early now after they rebounded from a truly horrendous start to the NHL season for Connor McDavid and company.
4. It sounds like trouble that Derek Forbort wasn’t able to play on Saturday and the rumblings are he may have aggravated the injury that kept him out for almost two months while trying to calm the issue down. The Bruins were already expected to be shopping for a physical, hardnosed D-man at the trade deadline, and that need is going to go up exponentially if Forbort becomes a physical question mark for the rest of the season.
5. Awful hit by Brendan Gallagher. Exactly the kind of hit that the NHL has been trying to get out of the game since Matt Cooke threw a cheap shot on Marc Savard. I would have given him more than five games, for sure, and I say that as somebody that has always appreciated Gallagher’s game.
Brendan Gallagher receives a match penalty for an an illegal check to the head on Adam Pelech #NHL | #GoHabsGo | #isles
— The Cam & Strick Podcast (@CamandStrick) January 26, 2024
pic.twitter.com/UfJzfbKagq