BOSTON — It's not often that the crowd gets to celebrate a goal when the home team gets shut out.
But that was the situation with 12:16 left in the first period of the Bruins' 3-0 loss to Carolina on Friday afternoon.
During a TV timeout, the team recognized veteran winger Mark Recchi for collecting his 1,500th career point with a third-period goal on Wednesday in Florida. The jumbotron showed a series of highlights from the future hall of famer's career, and the sellout crowd of 17,565 responded with a rousing ovation.
Recchi, just the 13th player in NHL history to reach that milestone, acknowledged the fans with a raise of his stick from the bench, eliciting more cheers on a day that brought few reasons for the partisan Bruins crowd to celebrate.
"It was obviously very nice," said Recchi. "The people in Boston have been wonderful to me. The organization has been great to me. I have wonderful teammates. It was a great feeling. It's always nice to see people's reaction to that. It's just too bad that we didn't happen to get a win too to top it off."
Recchi actually scored two goals on Wednesday to reach the 1,500-point plateau. He now has 567 goals and 933 assists for an even 1,500 points in 1,592 games over a 22-year career.
When the ovation for Recchi was mentioned to Claude Julien in his post-game press conference, it gave the Bruins coach a rare enjoyable subject to discuss in the wake of Friday's loss.
"I can't say enough [about Recchi]," said Julien. "I mean, we've talked about that for the last few days. He deserves every accolade he gets for what he's accomplished. His commitment to the game, to the conditioning, to paying the price, to everything. There's commitment, there's dedication, there's perseverance, everything that goes into that. The only way you can last that long in the league is having all of those kinds of things.
"So it's well deserved," added Julien. "It's just unfortunate that coming back home in our own building we weren't able to make it a real fun night for him by coming up with the win."
