Lucic/By S. Bradley
BOSTON — Milan Lucic entered tonight’s Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series with no goals in his last 20 games for the Bruins.
Boston’s power play hadn’t scored a 5-on-4 goal since April 9, a stretch of 12 games.
With one redirect of a Nathan Horton pass to the top of the crease by Lucic, both droughts ended in the Bruins’ 5-1 win that clinched a four-game sweep at the TD Garden and earned Boston a trip to the Eastern Conference finals.
When the lamp lit up after Lucic’s goal, he looked to the heavens.
“Yeah, it was great, especially, you know it was our first 5-on-4goal of the playoffs here,” said Lucic, who was Boston’s leading goal-scorer with 30 in the regular season. “So it’s nice that the power play was able to score a goal for us there. And right there was a great feeling once I scored that goal, just to get the monkey off the back and get that lead.”
Lucic added a second goal later to give Boston a 3-1 lead. While he had been shut out of the goal department in the postseason, Lucic’s linemates Horton and David Krejci have been on a roll. Now the Bruins have an entire first line that’s clicking on all cylinders heading into the showdown with Tampa Bay.
“He’s a good player for us. He’s a big, physical presence. The puck wasn’t going in the net for him. He started to show signs of getting his legs under him again, and when you haven’t scored for a while you tend to get tight,” said forward Mark Recchi. “He’s a young kid and hopefully now he’s found a really good time to start getting hot. He’s been a great teammate to everybody else this year. When guys are struggling or their fighting to score goals what good teams do is find ways to help him and take that pressure off of him.”
As for the power play, it finished the night 1-for-5 and 2 for its last 7 attempts against the Flyers. For the postseason, the totals are still an ugly 2-for-37. But there have been major signs of improvement.
“Yeah, I think our power play … has been pretty good overall,” said head coach Claude Julien. “I thought in the second period we had one there that we didn’t do a very good job with our entries and consequently we didn’t get much of a power play out of it. But once we got control in the offensive zone, I thought we’d been doing a better job of moving the puck and creating some scoring chances, so hopefully that’s something that keeps getting better, because we all know we’re going to need it.”
That one poor effort aside, we have owned tampa, and their goalie hasn’t really made a difference for us. Rolston is scarier than Bob or boucher, but not so good as Price. He may be hot, but the caps were pet. They couldn’t beat him in the regular season either. We have no such issues. It will be harder than Philly, but we should easily have the goaltending edge (and the D, and the “intangibles”.
This team is built to beat you 5 on 5. If special teams take up 20% of the game the B’s will beat you the other 80%. If your opponent doesn’t take any penalties than a PP doesn’t help anyways. The PK is just as vital and ours has been just fine.
I think the entrances into the offensive zone are still pretty bad-although at times they look better. I sometimes think they try to make too many passes or fail to recognize when to pass or dump the puck when they need to.
But once in the zone I still think it looks slow and stationary.
I agree that they are going to have to find some way to rattle Roloson-he is playing well and a goalie playing well gives his team confidence (something I think was proven in the Flyers series when a goalie isn’t playing well).
One thing I notice this year in the B’s over last year in the play offs is that the team isn’t sitting back on leads. I wonder if trying to sit on that 3-0 league has haunted Julien for a year-because this year they still put pressure into the offensive end and only dump to change lines no matter what the lead might be.
Spot on about that Julien comment. Not sure either what games he’s been watching, but 2-37 STINKS. That’s a PP clicking at a 5.4% rate. :p
My take on is that the B’s don’t seem to be crowding the crease when the puck is at the blue line or on the perimeter. Maybe more traffic in front of the net will help. That being said, the entrances on the PP have been better the last 2 games. They are going to need a better PP since Tampa doesn’t utilize a revolving-door goalie system and Roloson is playing as well as Thomas right now. They’re going to have to rattle him if we expect to score.
Not sure what games Julien is watching but the power play does not look good overall. It still looks abysmal even if we have scored 5-4 and 5-3 in the last few tries.
I hope during the little rest period Julien goes to town and looks at the Tampa Power Play. Theirs is a thing of beauty (all the reason to make sure the B’s stay disciplined and don’t take a buttload of penalties).
Our forwards don’t move and Kaberle doesn’t shoot and they mostly just stand around hoping a lane miraculously opens up-but it won’t because they don’t move.
I will say that Kaberle was putting up some nice passes 5 on 5 and during the PP-I think the PP problem is really a forward problem though-and probably an over reliance on shots from the point.
I haven’t looked the stat up but wonder how many points Tampa has 5 on 5 compared tot he B’s. I think the Tampa series may come down to the B’s staying out of the box. I know Tampa has one of the best PP’s in the league and they score often on their PP.
Great Headline!!! Was laughing out loud as I read it!