The Bruins went into the third period on Wednesday with a 3-2 lead on the Islanders and that's exactly how the game ended. New York managed just four shots in the final period, while the Bruins moved over the century mark with 101 points on the season.
But just because the final result looked a lot better than Monday's 5-3 loss to the Rangers after squandering a 3-0 lead, it doesn't mean that Bruins coach Claude Julien liked what he saw.
"Certainly not the, I guess, the kind of game you want to see from your team and I think the execution wasn't very good tonight," Julien said. "We weren't very sharp. Our best players certainly didn't make a difference and who made a difference was our fourth line.
"It's one of those games where you try and motivate your team to play hard and play well and I think there's a challenge there," Julien added. "You can say what you want and you can preach what you want, but there's a lot of players I think that are looking forward to the next season and so those are the challenges that we have at this time of year."
The Bruins have already locked up the Northeast Division crown and aren't likely to move out of the third seed in the East, so motivation could be an issue in these final regular-season games. Julien tried to snap his top lines out of their funk on Wednesday with some in-game adjustments.
He moved third-line center Chris Kelly up between first-line forwards Milan Lucic and Nathan Horton, while David Krejci slid down between Rich Peverley and Michael Ryder. The changes had little effect. Lucic and Horton had no shots on goal in the third, just as they had none in the first two periods. Krejci had one in the first, and none the rest of the way.
"I don't know if it was motivating or more of we weren't getting anything out of some of those lines," Julien said. "By moving players around, you hope that you could get a little bit more. I think that Krech's line had one shot there after two periods and he was the only one that had it, driving the net in the first. The other two guys ended up with no shots on net. So I think we expect a little bit more and, you know, so making a change here, maybe putting a guy that was going to be a more straightforward guy might have helped and David playing with some other wingers just to kind of spark things up. So I'm not blaming one or the other. I think that whole line was flat tonight. So we had to split them up."
Julien had to make a similar switch on defense, breaking up two of his usual pairings by separating Tomas Kaberle and Dennis Seidenberg and putting Kaberle with Adam McQuaid and Seidenberg with Andrew Ference.
"I think it was pretty obviously that some guys were having a tough time," Julien said of the defense. "I think you know the answer to that, we just kind of split them up and wanted to see, first off I split them up because they were maybe struggling together, and then put another pair together and see if that down the road, if we need it, it gave us an opportunity to have a look at it as well. I think it was experimental but it was out of necessity."
The biggest area of concern was the power play, which was 0-for-5 with just three shots all night. That included failing to convert a 5-on-3 advantage that lasted a full two minutes in the first and giving up a shorthanded goal in the second.
"It wasn't very good tonight," Julien said of the power play. "That kind of reflects on what we've been talking about here since I sat up here. Our best players weren't very good tonight, I didn't think. And when your best players aren't very good, you're not going to get the results you want."
The Bruins did get the victory they wanted in this one. They also came away knowing they will need to be a lot better to keep getting wins when the playoffs start next week.
