For one, they’ll have home-ice advantage throughout the series.
NESN play-by-play man Jack Edwards phoned into Thursday’s edition of SportsDesk to discuss Boston’s journey through the playoffs thus far.
“I think what’s going to help the Bruins most in this series is that they know Philly really well,” Jack told Cole Wright. “And from the Flyers’ standpoint, they know the Bruins really well. Every time these two teams play, it is a hard-hitting, physical, on-the-edge game with a lot of emotion in it. Even the regular-season games early in the season have a lot of tone to them, and it’s going to pick up at a very high point and then go up from there.”
The Bruins are one of three Eastern Conference teams still playing that wasn’t even assured of a postseason berth until the last weekend of the regular season. Did the Bruins and Flyers learn to play with a postseason mentality as the regular season wore down, and did that help them advance after the first round?
Maybe.
“I think it helps,” Jack said of the playoff mindset. “I think also there was a set of matchups here that fell into place unusually well for the teams that were the lower seeds that won. We all said we thought the Bruins would be a good matchup for Buffalo. … Philadelphia dominated its regular-season series against New Jersey, so that wasn’t that much of a surprise [when the Flyers beat the Devils in the first round].”
As for Marc Savard‘s role in the series, Jack is confident that head coach Claude Julien and the Bruins’ coaching staff will handle him with care.
“Claude Julien is very good at reading the pulse of a player when he comes back,” Jack said. “Unfortunately, Claude has had a ton of experience at doing that this season. The ability of the player is going to show up in ways the coach sees best, and he’s going to know how often he can skate Savard.”
For more preview analysis from Cole and Jack, check out the video below.
