The Bruins and Lightning have about 22 hours to prepare for their Game 3 matchup Wednesday night.
Boston dropped Game 2 in overtime to Tampa Bay on Tuesday and now must fight for a series lead the following day.
While it’s certainly not a lot of time for turnaround and to right the wrongs, the back-to-back doesn’t appear to bother the B’s.
Bruce Cassidy, for one, thinks it may be a good thing.
“Sometimes it’s good to get right back at it when you lose a hockey game,” the head coach said during his Zoom postgame press conference. “You know we’ll see tomorrow if that’s good for us. You saw their energy early on, they had good push, usually after a loss you have that, you know they may be riding high and going to build off that because they want to even the series. So that’s a tough one sometimes to answer. Minutes wise we were pretty good I thought, balanced going into the overtime, obviously only a five minute overtime, so that part was good, I don’t think anybody had to go, no injuries so we didn’t really have to double shift anybody, so that part of our recovery should be OK.”
Brad Marchand pinpointed what could be the “biggest challenge.”
“I think the biggest challenge obviously is the pace,” he said on Zoom. “They’re fast games out there. … Like you said, that’s a team that competes hard and works very hard. To play that two nights in a row, it’s going to be a battle. Like you said, we all play back-to-backs all the time. No excuses come playoff time. You have to show up and you have to play. You have to find a way to win. just have to rely on the whole group tomorrow. Everyone is going to have to have their best games if we want to compete with that team.”
Sean Kuraly just seems ready for Game 3:
“I think the series is 1-1, we’ve got another game tomorrow, a great chance to get ahead,” he said on Zoom. “I don’t know any other way to look at it. We have another game. We like our game plan. We like our team. They’ve got a good team. We’re going to come out and try to play the best we can and get the series back one in our direction.”
Puck drop from Scotiabank Arena is set for 8 p.m. ET.
