Bruins-Canadiens Pregame Notes
There’s no time to really agonize over the dreadful 3-0 show the Bruins put on last night against the Rangers–not when the Canadiens are literally right around the corner. The Bruins (34-18-2) will take on their archrivals (23-25-9) tonight at 7 p.m. The game can be seen nationwide on NBC Sports Network.
This is the last of six meetings this season between the division rivals whose enmity for one another is about as old as Betty White. Boston leads the series 3-2. During the hangover month of October, the Bruins lost both parts of a home-and-home with the Habs, one by a score of 2-1 and one by a score of 4-2. The Bs shut them out 1-0 in November, beat them 3-2 in December and 2-1 in January.
Montreal has really slipped as of late. Languishing near the bottom of the East and going for the bottom of the Northeast along with the Buffalo Sabres, the Habs just aren’t what they used to be. Right now, they’re not even in the playoff structure. Problems with personnel (remember the francophone protests against naming monolingual Randy Cunneyworth coach?) and a general malaise have left the Habs not looking like their normal selves.
The last time these two teams met, Michael Cammalleri disappeared from the bench halfway through the game. Concerns about injuries rose until it was discovered that he had been traded to the Calgary Flames. The method is still really strange and unusual, though, and according to Carey Price, his teammates didn’t even get to say goodbye. Cammalleri had spoken out about the team’s general malaise a few days earlier, though he said his comments were misconstrued as a result of needing to translate them from French to English.
Boston and Montreal find themselves in similar places right now. Both have just come off a loss–Montreal’s to the Carolina Hurricanes on Feb. 13–and are both hungry to get a W. No word yet on who will mind net for the Bruins. At this point, it’s really anyone’s guess, considering that Tim Thomas isn’t doing so hot lately, but neither is Tuukka Rask.
Captain Zdeno Chara, usually unflappable, seems a little frustrated with how his team is doing right now: “”Right now, yeah, it seems like we win one we lose one, we win one, we lose one. So, it’s .500 hockey right now, which is, I don’t think it’s bad but I don’t think it’s great. I think that it’s something that we, as a team, we realize is — for the team we have — it’s not good enough. So, we’ve got to get out of it.”
Coach Claude Julien elaborated on what he meant when he said the Bruins needed to rediscover their identity on this road trip: “We’re a checking team that scores. That’s our identity. We’re a checking team that scores, but right now, we’re not checking and we’re not scoring. We’ve got to get back to get back to checking, and checking is playing a lot harder, winning battles, and being really hard to score against, and when you do that, then teams get frustrated like we did tonight, make a few mistakes, and it ends up in the net. So [the Rangers] beat us at our own game.”
Indeed.
Tune in for Bruins/Canadiens at 7 p.m. Who knows what will happen?
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