If people were looking for 2011 Stanley Cup Final level animosity or entertainment levels, they might have come away a wee bit disappointed after last night’s pitting of the Best of the East, the Boston Bruins, versus the Best of the West, the Vancouver Canucks.
Truth be told, Jim Montgomery even admitted afterward that the B’s probably caught the Canucks on a bad night in the middle of a long East Coast trip for the British Columbia-based team.
It didn’t have the juice of two teams looking to make a statement against each other with some wondering beforehand if this could be the 2024 Stanley Cup Final pairing four months from now.
But what it did produce was a compelling, inspired defensive performance from the Bruins coming off a sloppy, mistake-filled loss to the Calgary Flames just a couple of days prior on home ice. As they have so often done armed with their proud team culture for the last few decades, the Bruins responded from a humbling loss and did it with a layered, hard-working defensive effort in front of Linus Ullmark collecting his first shutout of the season in a 4-0 win over Vancouver at TD Garden.
It was only the second time high-powered Vancouver has been shut out all season, and the first time since the very third game of the regular season way back in October when the Canucks were still figuring out exactly who they were. They also did it while saddling Elias Pettersson and Elias Lindholm with a minus-4 apiece while completely shutting down Vancouver’s most dangerous players.
“I was very impressed [with the defensive effort],” said Ullmark, who made 17 saves in a shutout where the team did the job in front of him. “We said that beforehand that it wasn’t tolerable to do what we did last game (a 4-1 loss to the Calgary Flames on Tuesday), and the guys really took it to heart. We came out there flying. Obviously, you see Marchy, he goes out there and scores a highlight-reel [shorthanded] goal, and after that we just kept on going.”
None of it is really a major surprise for a Boston Bruins team tied with Vancouver for the third-best goals against average (2.57) in the league, and also now again tied with the Canucks with an NHL-best 73 points this season after the victory. It’s a team that’s played the right way defensively since just after the Christmas break and has found ways to bounce back when the inevitable loss is mixed in with all the Black and Gold winning.
Perhaps most encouraging of all, though, was the rebound for a struggling Bruins penalty kill, as the B’s kicked in a pair of shorthanded goals to spark the offense. That’s big for a team that had dropped to 10th in the league in overall effectiveness while allowing power play goals in 14 of their last 21 games headed into Thursday night.
“It’s always a work-in-progress and our penalty kill hasn’t been up to far from when we started this year,” said Charlie Coyle, who is riding a 10-game point scoring streak after collecting two more assists in the win. “So that was an area we wanted to get better at. You’re not looking to score on the PK, but when the time is right, and the opportunity presents itself you’ll jump to those.
“It just happened to work out that way because we are playing the right way. We were together and that’s our defensemen too, not just me and [Brad Marchand]. We’re all tight together and reading the play, and then we’re in good position to capitalize on it.”
Nobody loves scoring short handed against the Vancouver Canucks more than Brad Marchand pic.twitter.com/xDPwKhnlt8
— Joe Haggerty (@HackswithHaggs) February 9, 2024
Certainly, the shorthanded razzle-dazzle will get the most attention, but Brandon Carlo logged a team-high 4:01 of shorthanded ice time while serving as the play-killing eraser in front of the Boston net.
There is no greater defense, it could be argued, than a team that can quickly transition defense into offense and that’s exactly what Marchand did 37 seconds into the game. Later in the first period, Danton Heinen scored another shorty with Coyle throwing pinpoint perfect passes to set up both special teams scoring plays.
“The sense of urgency. First, second and third effort, that’s what it takes especially against great teams. They’re in a position for a reason with the way they play,” said Coyle. “For us it’s being a five-man unit and something breaks down it’s the next guy. We have those layers. The second, third and fourth efforts to get the puck out and then we go off into transition.
“It’s something that should be second nature for us. It’s how we work and it’s how we should play.”
Best of all, the defensive effort never waned or stopped when the Bruins separated with a two-goal explosion early in the second period that put things out of reach. Vancouver managed just four shots on net in the third period as Boston maintained the defensive intensity and, even better, was able to work everybody into more shifts to spread out the ice time evenly across the whole group.
“[We] didn’t give up odd-man rushes,” said Montgomery. “I think that was the most pleasant thing because when you’re with a lead, you don’t want to give them opportunities to get back in it either by taking penalties or giving up odd-man rushes, and I liked the way we continued to hang on to pucks in the offensive zone.”
Now it’s a matter of maintaining that higher level of compete and defensive intensity with just 31 games remaining in the season, and not many nights where they will get a “dud” performance from the other side as Vancouver was explaining away this one after the one-sided game had concluded.
It didn’t live up to the advance billing of what it could have been with Bruins vs. Canucks, but the muscular defensive effort was exactly what Boston was looking for while refining their game for the NHL stretch run.