You certainly wouldn’t know the Boston Bruins had been in a scoring rut by the way they looked Saturday afternoon against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Headlined by the play of Brad Marchand (three goals, oneassist), David Pastrnak (two goals, one assist), Patrice Bergeron (one goal) and David Krejci (one goal, one assist), the Bruins scored five second-period goals and added two in the third en route to a 7-5 win over the Penguins at TD Garden.
“Yeah, I think it’s a good learning experience for our group,” Marchand said on a postgame video conference with reporters. “These are the games where, you have to be able to go through some adversity, play different kinds of games. I mean, it’s not always going to be the same, especially come playoff time. You have to be able to keep the lead, keep building on it and that’s one I thing I think we did a really good job of. Once we got the lead, we didn’t sit back, we kept playing and the goals we scored late ended up being big for us.”
Pastrnak, who was moved to the second line prior to Saturday’s game, expressed how he thinks the result against Pittsburgh could go a long way into helping the team’s confidence.
“It was nice, obviously,” Pastrnak said on a postgame video conference. “It’s definitely going to help our confidence. You know, obviously, had some trouble scoring lately so overall a huge two points and to score seven goals, it’s great.”
The Bruins trailed the Penguins 1-0 after the first period, but came out with a different mindset in the second. Bergeron tied the game 1-1just 11 seconds into the middle period before Pastrnak scored 34 ticks later. It gave the Bruins a 2-1 lead a mere 45 seconds into the frame before taking a 5-3 advantage into the final period.
“You know, I think we were just tired of it,” Pastrnak said. “We had a tough start and we said ‘Enough,’ and we wanted to come into the second period really hard and just put the puck deep, get our forecheck going, get our legs — you know, 1 o’clock games sometimes you can’t find the legs so it takes a while — and that was our main focus in the second period. Then got scoring opportunities and today we capitalized on them. So, I think that was a huge part.”
Marchand credited the fact it was a full team effort.
“It’s something we have to do every night as a group. I thought our whole team was committed to putting pucks in deep, winning battles, competing hard,” Marchand said. “(Our defense) did a great job competing in our end. They (Pittsburgh) come really hard, they have a great forecheck, they’re all over us, so the D did a great job winning battles, getting pucks up and allowed us to get on the forecheck.
“That’s something we have to do every single night. That’s a hard game to play against and we need to do that, especially building up towards playoffs. So, all the way through the lineup guys were committed and did a great job.”
The Bruins move to 19-10-5 on the season and will return to the TD Garden ice Monday against the Philadelphia Flyers.
