The Boston Bruins took down the Montreal Canadiens 5-3 in the second leg of a back-to-back Sunday at Bell Centre. The B’s now have a seven-game win streak over their longtime Original Six rival.
With just three games remaining in the regular season, it’s time for the Black and Gold to prepare for the playoffs.
“We’re getting there,” Erik Haula said, as seen on a team-provided video. “There’s some fine-tuning obviously. It’s great to get our team back and it was great to have (Hampus Lindholm, Linus Ullmark and David Pastrnak) back last game at home. I’m assuming that they’ll be ready to go next game.
“… I feel like our group’s confident and ready for the big dance.”
Here are some more notes from Bruins-Canadiens
— Taylor Hall took a big hit in the game but appears to have avoided injury.
“He seemed to be okay,” head coach Bruce Cassidy said as seen on a team-provided video. “I don’t know if he was winded. They didn’t take him to the concussion room or the spotter’s room so that’s always a good sign. Medical guys let him play. We would not do that if there’s any danger at all. We’ve had a number of guys leave this year for concussions so I was told he was fine.
“We’ll see how he is in the morning. It didn’t look good over there but like I said, hopefully he just got winded and it was one of those situations where he didn’t know where he was for a second or couldn’t get the air into his system enough to get off the ice.”
— Charlie McAvoy made an impressive shot on what would become the game-deciding goal in the second period.
“It was a set play off the draw and I think their guy (Christian) Dvorak ended up screening the goalie,” Cassidy said. “Good for Charlie. He can shoot the puck hard and (good for him) to shoot it because a lot of times he’s looking to defer from there and it hit the net. We’ve been off-net a little bit lately from that area. It gave us a little bit of breathing room that at the end of the day we didn’t think we would need but we certainly did.”
— Cassidy still believes in the Bruins-Canadiens rivalry despite the lopsided results as of late.
“The rivalry is still there from the years,” Cassidy said. “Every time we play Montreal we want to make sure we put our best foot forward and I’m sure they feel the same way, especially at home, especially on a night like tonight. We had the upper hand early and they didn’t… no quit in their game, give them credit. They battled back right to the last 30 seconds.”
— Haula skated past the puck before scoring on a penalty shot to take a 2-0 lead in an odd fashion.
“Honestly I was so flustered after that happened I didn’t really know what was going on and it was so loud that I didn’t know if the refs blew it or not,” Haula said. “I just grabbed the puck, I was like ‘oh alright, I guess I’ll take it down’ and thank god I scored.”
— The Bruins will return to Boston to take on the Florida Panthers at TD Garden on Tuesday with puck drop set for 7 p.m. ET. Pregame coverage starts at 6 p.m. ET on NESN.
