BOSTON -- The Bruins are finally starting to resemble the team everybody knew they could be at the beginning of the season.
Finally armed with an NHL roster that’s close to full health and a team that can now focus on consistent line combinations and defensemen pairings, the Bruins have won five games in a row after efficiently dispatching the Minnesota Wild, 4-0, at TD Garden on Tuesday night. The shutout win over the Wild was arguably the easiest one over the five-game winning stretch, with the B’s taking advantage of a Minnesota outfit that was fatigued after playing in Montreal on Monday night.
But give credit where it’s due: The Bruins scored three goals in the first period to completely take the starch out of the Wild, and then locked down the defensive clamps by allowing only a couple of good scoring chances over the entire 60-minute game. It’s about par for the course for the Black and Gold over the last few games, as the B’s have scored 19 goals in five games (3.8 goals per game) and allowed just nine goals over that same time span.
It’s the kind of two-way hockey that certainly will lead to winning streaks now, and the Bruins hope fill be a team identity formula for playoff success come April, May and June.
“[The] past couple weeks -- it’s not about trading chances, you know. I think we’re just playing tight as a unit, you know? Like defending and then attacking smart and the past few games I think we’ve been funneling pucks to the net more with some traffic, and today especially it paid off big time,” said Tuukka Rask. “That’s a great sign because that’s how you’ve got to play come the springtime.
“The time and space is going to be limited and there’s not going to be shootouts going both ways, so you have to be resilient with the puck and kind of get traffic in front of that net and fight for those goals. So, that’s a great sign that we can do that.”
BRUINS 4, WILD 0
So what’s the reason for all of this sudden success for a team that was scraping out wins in one-goal games just a month ago?
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Clearly it’s the return to health of nearly the entire roster, with Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron back healthy after missing significant time, along with other important pieces like Kevan Miller, Jake DeBrusk and Brandon Carlo. The continuity is allowing Bruce Cassidy to develop consistent forward trios and D-pairs, and give those players time to work on their chemistry and ability to generate offense. It’s also giving the B’s a chance to craft a team identity based on the Perfection Line, arguably the NHL’s best goaltending tandem, a vital second-line piece in Jake DeBrusk (who scored his 14th goal of the season Tuesday) and a fourth line of Noel Acciari, Sean Kuraly and Chris Wagner that’s really coming into their own.
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“A big part of [the winning streak] is that we don’t need to change our lines around a lot. When you’re able to play with a group for an extended period of time you get that chemistry that we have kind of been looking for,” said Brad Marchand, who scored a goal and had three points in the win over Minnesota. “It’s a lot easier to be confident in your game and kind of read off of one another. Yeah, a big part of it is having our group back so hopefully we can stay healthy for a while.”
Slap a strong and diversified D-men corps together with those pieces, and the Bruins have themselves a winning hockey games with the tacit knowledge that the hockey club will get better ahead of the NHL trade deadline. Now it’s quite frankly about adding to the group that’s powered up for a five game Bruins winning streak and addressing some of the weaknesses that the team persevered through in the first half of the season.
There wasn’t much of the extraordinary going on with the Bruins dispatching a tired Wild group on Tuesday night, but the five game winning streak wrapped around the Winter Classic has been pretty impressive for Boston. Now it’s a matter of continuing to build on a great start to the second half of the season, and seeing just how deeply the Bruins can take a group that’s just now figuring out how to win after paying all kinds of dues in the first half of the season.
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