At the very least, the Boston Bruins have shown their usual resiliency during the regular season.
Once again, the bounce-back B’s rebounded back with a strong effort in blanking the Columbus Blue Jackets by a 4-0 score at TD Garden on Saturday night and followed up a stinker with a robust performance.
Perhaps more importantly they are beginning to unlock the key to performing better on home ice as they’ve gone undefeated on home ice this month.
The shutout victory lifted the Black and Gold to a perfect 6-0-0 on home ice during the month of December, and improved their season record at TD Garden to 12-6-2 this season after they entered this month with a middling .500 record at home. The truth is that the B’s have been disappointing on home ice for the last few years, particularly with a slew of difficult home losses in the playoffs, and that a return to home dominance is a welcome thing for a Bruins team still hammering out their team identity.
The fact they did it in a month where they also had a two-week long odyssey road trip through Western Canada just makes the performance on Causeway Street all the more impressive. Usually, a team can be underwhelming at home coming off a long, grueling trip like that, but the Bruins didn’t fall into that trip even as they were playing some lighter competition with teams like Buffalo, Columbus, Montreal, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington coming through Boston this month.
Still, a playoff hockey team needs to take care of business against the teams they should beat, and the Bruins have been doing just that at home.
“It’s good. It’s important for us to be a good home team, especially with the way that we are built,” said David Pastrnak, who sniped a beautiful breakaway goal in bar-down fashion in Saturday night’s victory. “We have to make it hard for teams to come [in the Garden]. It’s nice for us and hopefully we can take that into the next year.”
Some Bruins players have really embraced the home-ice bounce with Charlie Coyle having scored seven of his 10 goals this season on home ice, and Justin Brazeau and Cole Koepke – both goal-scorers in Saturday night’s victory – having both lit the majority of their lamps at TD Garden this year. But the Bruins have a real opportunity to make TD Garden a very unpleasant place to play in the second half of the year leading into the Stanley Cup playoffs where they can be a physical, hard-working pain in the ass to play against.
That’s something they’ve done this past month, and they deserve some credit for giving the fans what they expect and are looking for.
“It’s always nice to have some home cooking, right? You always want to be a good home team,” said Joe Sacco. “You definitely want to play well. If you can have success on the road then you might not have as much at home, but we’re in a stretch where we can really take advantage of some home games. Our guys obviously love playing at home in front of our fans, so they always want to put together a good record here.
“It’s something we take pride in. We want to make our fans proud of the effort that we put forth every night.”
Does the recent run of home dominance take any of the sting out of a string of embarrassing blowout losses on the road, including the 6-2 drubbing in Columbus coming out of the Christmas break?
It most definitely doesn’t, but a great run of home performance can some of the venom out of it all from a Bruins’ fan’s perspective and set them up to be a harder out in the postseason than some might assume given their uneven performance and rough goal differential to this point in the year.
ONE-TIMERS
*Although it was a pretty quiet night for him on the ice, it was perfect timing for the NHL debut for Fabian Lysell right after the Christmas holiday. After getting a call on Saturday that he would be playing in Boston rather than on an AHL bus headed to Hartford, he was able to play his first NHL game in front of his family (mother Maria, father Henrik and sister Frida), who traveled to Boston for the Christmas holiday.
They were actually set to leave back for Sweden on Sunday, so the NHL callup for Lysell allowed him to pay back his family for all the work that had gone into him being a first-round pick, and now a bona fide NHL player.
“That's what it's all about,” said Lysell after the game was over. “They've been my biggest supporters throughout all the years I've been playing, and helping me with everything, driving me to the rink, cooking, all that stuff, late nights. So, it's more so for them, honestly, than it is for me. It's special.”
Lysell finished with a plus-1 in 11:32 of ice time after he was on the ice for Justin Brazeau’s opening goal on his very first NHL shift, but the 21-year-old finished without a shot attempt and/or any other real impact on the game in a bit of an invisible performance.
Fabian Lysell first NHL Shift and Justin Brazeau give the #NHLBruins a 1-0 lead pic.twitter.com/a7cW7bgKGw
— Lucasparmenter23 (@Lucasparmenter0) December 29, 2024
It remains to be seen if this was a one-game reward for Lysell or a long-term audition after Oliver Wahlstrom was removed from the lineup, but Wahlstrom had a much bigger impact on the games he was in even if he hasn’t cracked the scoresheet for the Black and Gold as of yet.
*Congrats to Hampus Lindholm on a big month where he played Santa Claus for David Pastrnak’s child for Christmas and announced his engagement on social media. It certainly looked like his injured leg was on the mend as there’s a picture of the Bruins defenseman bent down on one knee in an engagement photo, but it remains to be seen how close he is to a return after being out since blocking a shot against the St. Louis Blues back on Nov. 12.
Hampus Lindholm and Amanda are engaged pic.twitter.com/GIi5r5V3b4
— Hannah (@babybergy37) December 25, 2024