Once again, they are seemingly in command of a playoff series against Philadelphia. Last year, they led 3-0 in the second round. Now, they’ve won the first two games on the road and return to Boston looking for another 3-0 lead with Game 3 at the Garden on Wednesday night.
But this lead has a very different feel to it, in large part due to the painful lessons learned in last year’s disastrous collapse.
“I’m not looking so much at where we are in there series more than what’s at stake in [Wednesday] night’s game, how well do we have to play, and the rest will take care of itself,” Bruins coach Claude Julien said. “If we play well, we’ll be up by another game. I don’t think there’s anyone in that dressing room, including coaching staff and players, that are sitting comfortable. This is going to be a tough task, and [the Flyers] are a good team, and we’re ready to face that challenge.”
The Flyers are clinging to the memory of last year’s rally to buoy their spirits after a demoralizing 3-2 overtime loss in Philadelphia. They’re also hoping to use some head games to put the pressure on the Bruins, make Boston feel the weight of last year’s failure to get back in this series as well.
Flyers coach Peter Laviolette was anything but subtle in trying to shift the pressure to the Bruins in his postgame comments on Monday.
“When you lose your first two games in your home building, I would say that there is a real expectation for the Bruins to win the series now,” he said. “So it relives us of the pressure, I believe, a little bit to just go in and play a game in Boston. And while that relieves us of the pressure, it certainly mounts onto them to be successful now that they have a 2-0 lead.”
On Tuesday, he reiterated that message after the Flyers’ practice, stressing how comfortable the Flyers are in overcoming long odds.
“You know, we are going to go into Boston and have some fun,” Laviolette told reporters. “We just put our comfortable slippers on. It’s time to go in there, like I said, the pressure really gets alleviated a bit. When you are down last year 0-3, you’re down this year 0-2 in back-to-back series against the same team. That’s technically 0-5. I’m not sure that any team in the history of sports has ever come back from 0-5. So we are just calm in there.”
The Bruins aren’t falling for the head games though. Veteran forward Mark Recchi, who won a Cup playing for Laviolette in Carolina in 2006, knows exactly what his old boss is trying to do.
“He’s a very good coach, very intelligent and he’s trying to take the pressure off his hockey club,” Recchi told reporters at the Garden on Tuesday after being asked about Laviolette’s comments. “He’s a very good coach, and that’s why he’s won a Cup. He’s good at it, and I have a lot of respect for him as a coach. He’s going to do whatever he can. But we can’t worry about what he says. We’ve got to worry about what happens in this dressing room. We’ll be ready to play. We believe in each other, we trust each other, and that’s all you can do.”
Getting the final two wins needed to close out this series would be more than the Bruins were able to do last year. But that collapse a year ago may be the best defense Boston has against getting comfortable with this lead or letting any overconfidence seep into their game. The way Philadelphia played in Game 2, when only a superlative effort from Tim Thomas enabled the Bruins to escape with the 3-2 overtime victory, will help keep Boston grounded as well.
“I don’t think so much about being up 2-0, again, especially after [Monday] night,” Julien said of Game 2, when the Bruins were outshot 54-41. “We know how tough the competition is. We just need to come in here [Wednesday] and be ready to play as good as we can. There’s obviously some areas of our game that were certainly not up to par [Monday]. That was maybe later in the game. And we have to correct those, and we’re going to make those corrections and hopefully those adjustments before [Wednesday] night.”
The Bruins don’t even have to look as far back as last spring to understand the tenuous nature of a 2-0 lead in the playoffs. All they need to do is recall where they were at the start of the last series. The Bruins lost the first two games at home against Montreal and were written off by many, only to come back to win four of the next five games to take the series.
“It’s good to be on the other side this round,” Bruins center David Krejci said. “We can control our own things and bring it back to our building. We are going to use our fans as our seventh player and just go out there and take it game by game. Hopefully we can win the third one and go from there.”
Both sides are well aware that even winning the third one won’t guarantee anything, but the Bruins still want to go up 3-0, regardless of what happened with that lead last year.
“It’s a nice position to be in, especially when you win the first two on the road,” Julien said. “There is no doubt it’s a perfect scenario for the first two games on the road. But you guys keep bringing this up, we are not thinking about last year. … Half the players weren’t here last year so we can bring up whatever we want. Our goal here is to focus on what is happening this year. What happened last year is last year, so it really hasn’t been on our minds. … Absolutely we’ve learned from that. We are using those kind of things as a learning tool.”
The Flyers learned from it as well. And while they may seek inspiration from last year’s comeback and their coach can talk a brave game about the pressure shifting to the Bruins, they also understand the reality of the odds against digging out of another 3-0 hole. And that truly puts the pressure on the Flyers in Game 3, no matter how Laviolette spins it.
“I think we have to [win Game 3],” Flyers forward Claude Giroux said. “Coming back from 0-3, I think it’s pretty hard even if we did it last year. We don’t want to put ourselves in that situation.”
After last year, the Bruins could have been excused for dreading being in that position again as well. Now they’re relishing another chance at finishing this series the right way, with full knowledge of just how much more work is left to accomplish that goal.
Have the Bruins learned from last year’s painful collapse how to close out the resilient Flyers? Share your thoughts below.
