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Ten days away from the start of the 2015-16 season, Boston Bruins netminder
Tuukka Rask made a return to the Boston crease for the first time since his exhausting end to the year last April.
The result wasn’t what the former Vezina winner hoped for in his first game, as the B’s fell to the Detroit Red Wings by a 3-1 final while Rask finished the night with 21 saves on 24 shots against, but the 28-year-old looked better as the game went on, with an active poke-check added to his game.
“Some of those shots were really top shelf. They were good goals,” B’s coach Claude Julien admitted. “It’s his first game so like anybody else he’s entitled to have those games. I think he’s our number one goalie and we’re not here to evaluate him, we’re here to evaluate the others. For him, it’s to find his groove. First game and no doubt he’ll feel even better in the next one that he plays.”
It was a pedestrian first for both squads, really, with the Bruins and Red Wings each putting just five shots on the opposing netminder, and without any real consistency or flow to the game.
“The first period there just didn’t seem to be much happening,” Wings coach Jeff Blashill said. “But that’s the way lots of games go. You’ve got to find a way to make sure that you continue to build on it.”
Detroit’s
Drew Miller broke the stalemate with a snipe over Rask’s shoulder 7:11 into the second period, while
Tomas Jurco took advantage of a bad defensive miscue by the Bruins just three minutes and change later, as the Wings skated off with a 2-0 edge through two periods of play.
The Red Wings pushed that lead to three courtesy of an
Andreas Athanasiou strike just 48 seconds into the third period. But before the three could be tallied onto the jumbotron at the Garden, Julien decided to use his coach’s challenge -- a new addition to the NHL rulebook -- and find out whether or not the Wings’ goal, by all means the dagger in this preseason affair, was a legal goal.
“It’s like football, it comes from upstairs, it comes from the people around that get an opportunity to see the replays. More or less, you’ve got to really base yourself on your opinions, and if they think it’s worth challenging then you challenge,” Julien said of his challenge. “Tonight, when I looked at the replay up top I saw the leg behind Tuukka’s pad and kind of dragging it. Now, did it happen after the fact that the puck had gone past his glove and trickled in or did it happen before? So I’ll look at that and even the referees want to learn from those kinds of things. It’s a learning process, so we’ll look at that stuff. My instinct was to challenge that had I had an opportunity to. Absolutely those are things that in preseason you kind of have a mindset on, saying ‘What would I do in this situation here?’”
But after a brief delay, the goal stood, and the Wings were up by three.
And in spite of three power-play opportunities and an 18-shot frame, the Bruins seemed destined to be stoned by
Jimmy Howard and company. That was until
Loui Eriksson broke through with a net-front goal, with the power-play helpers going to puck-movers Torey Krug and Colin Miller.
The strike gave the Bruins a 1-for-5 mark on the man advantage for the night, and although it meant nothing in regards to the end result, Eriksson and the Bruins will take it as a measure of progress.
“We had some good looks on the other power plays too, and I think we hit the crossbar in the second and we were moving it pretty good. So it was definitely nice to find at least one goal,” Eriksson, entering his third season in Boston, noted of the team’s chemistry. “You definitely want to come in with high confidence and feel good about yourself and your game when the season starts. So it’s definitely important games here to get that feeling that you have that confidence to make plays and play good.”
The loss, Boston’s first of the preseason (they’re 4-1-0 now, with two of those four wins coming via the shootout or overtime), came in spite of a veteran-heavy lineup on the Boston bench. With 12 regulars in terms of skaters and Rask in net compared to a Red Wings team that looked a bit on the young side, it was a lineup that gave Julien the tools and minutes needed to tinker with ideas and strategies he’ll most likely have to go forth with once the ball gets rolling on the B’s 82-game grind next week.
And some of the lesser known guys still trying to crack the roster.
“I think as you get closer to the end, whether it’s the guys that are still around which are obviously the guys that should be around but then at the same time you see certain guys separate themselves from others,” said Julien, set to begin his ninth year behind the Boston bench. “We all know that the beginning of training camp you’ve probably got half American league junior players and you only have to dress eight veterans so it’s a different lineup as you get closer to the end so there’s no doubt that it give us a better opportunity to evaluate certain guys that are still in the running here.”
With the roster at 36, the opportunity for 13 guys to separate themselves from the pack will thin. Soon.
Chara improving while B’s remain cautious
Injured in the first period of Thursday’s victory over the New York Rangers, Boston captain
Zdeno Chara was on the ice earlier this morning, and although he’s progressing, the B’s are going to take their time when it comes to getting the face of the franchise back into preseason play -- if they even do.
“We’ve kept it day to day because you know he’s progressing. We’ll see how the rest of the week goes here. And you know like anything else we’re going to be more cautious than anything,” Julien said. “And you know same thing with David [Krejci] yesterday you guys asked, you know. It’s been a long camp and a lot of guys, you know, started getting a little stiff so we’re over cautious with him – we don’t want anything to go wrong. So this is how we’re handling some of our veteran players.”
Chara, the face of the Boston point and do-it-all defender of almost ten years in the Hub, missed 19 games last year with a knee injury, and had surgery to repair a fractured ankle at the end of the regular season. So the last thing the Bruins want to do is aggravate this injury, whatever it may be.
Up next
The Black and Gold head to New York City for a Wednesday night preseason tilt with the Rangers. The Bruins won a head-to-head with the Blueshirts earlier this preseason by a 4-3 shootout final. It will be the B’s sixth of seven preseason contests on the schedule. You can almost feel Hockey Season upon us.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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