Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy on rematch with Blues: ‘The Stanley Cup unfortunately is not in the building tonight’

BRIGHTON, Mass – Bruce Cassidy was asked if he considers Saturday night’s game against the St. Louis Blues a “rematch” of the Stanley Cup Final that the Bruins lost in seven games a little over four months ago, and he didn’t hesitate with his answer.

“It’s not a rematch. The Stanley Cup, unfortunately, is not in the building tonight, so this is for two points,” lamented Cassidy. “It’s a team we got to know well, so I’m sure there could be a different level of intensity that develops different from some other games. But going into it I don’t see it as anything really different.”

MORE HAGGERTY: Ritchie starting to 'turn the corner' for B's

The Bruins have employed various answers to this question over the last couple of days with some like veteran Brad Marchand saying “it’s just another game” and that it’s not going to change the team’s mindset headed into back-to-back weekend games against the Blues and New York Rangers. Though Marchand did admit after speaking again on Saturday that he might have been downplaying the team’s feelings a bit headed into what could normally be a sleepy, early-season non-conference game against a team like the Blues.

“It’s a little cliché that we’d be approaching it as any other game,” admitted Marchand. “Obviously there’s emotions there from playoff-time and the history is obviously very vivid in our minds. We’re going to try to approach it like any other game because ultimately all its going to be is two points, but it just brings back a lot of memories of what we went through. [It brings up] how tough it was going tough it was to go through that and losing. That’s probably the biggest things about it.”

Others such as the 23-year-old Jake DeBrusk are going through the post-Stanley Cup Final thing for the first time and admitted there are still “hard feelings” when it comes to the Blues team that dashed their dreams early last summer.

But the bottom line is that no matter how much everybody walks down memory lane when it comes to the 2019 Stanley Cup Final, a Saturday night game in late October isn’t going to do much to change anybody’s mind about what happened last June. The B’s had a wonderful opportunity to win another Cup and let it slip through their fingers against a heavy, physical Blues team that gladly took it from them, and a convincing two-point victory this weekend isn’t going to do much more than make everybody wonder what might have been.