PITTSBURGH—The Boston Bruins keep talking about fortunate bounces and a dash of luck, insisting the margin between themselves and the Pittsburgh Penguins is thin.At the moment, it looks like a chasm.Brad Marchand scored twice during a four-goal first period and the Bruins routed the Pittsburgh 6-1 in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals on Monday night to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-7 series.The Bruins and Blackhawks are now both two wins away from a possible Original Six Stanley Cup Finals matchup.
“It doesn’t matter what the series is at right now,” Marchand said. “If they get the next one, they’re right back in it. The next one is the one that’s most important.”
It’s a phrase the top-seed Penguins repeated after losing Game 1 on Saturday night to fall behind in a series for the first time in the playoffs. The inspired play they needed never materialized.Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were held scoreless for the second straight contest to send the NHL’s highest-scoring team slouching to Boston for Game 3 on Wednesday with its season on the line.
“Tonight was terrible, there’s no other way to describe it,” Crosby said. “A loss is a loss. It’s frustrating. You don’t like giving one like that. We really didn’t do a lot of things to give ourselves a chance to win. This one we have to forget pretty quickly.”
It won’t be easy.David Krejci, Nathan Horton, Patrice Bergeron and Johnny Boychuk also scored for Boston while Tuukka Rask stopped 26 shots. Pittsburgh’s top-ranked power play went 0 for 2 and the Penguins were never in it after the Bruins scored three times in 17 minutes to chase Tomas Vokoun.Brandon Sutter netted Pittsburgh’s lone goal. Vokoun gave up three first-period goals on 12 shots before being replaced by Marc-Andre Fleury.
“We’ve gotten away from our game,” Pittsburgh coach Dan Bylsma said. “We’ve gotten off our game plan.”
The Bruins had more than a little something to do with it. Pouncing on every mistake — of which there were plenty to choose — Boston buried the Penguins early. Not bad for a team that needed an improbable third-period rally in Game 7 of the first round against Toronto to advance.In the span of three weeks, Boston has morphed from a team hanging by a thread into one capable of bookending the Stanley Cup it won two years ago.
“Winning that Toronto series created some momentum from that,” Bruins forward Milan Lucic said. “We’ve been able to keep riding that momentum. We need to keep pushing harder.”
Another nudge or two would almost certainly send the Penguins toppling over.Pittsburgh blamed its choppy play in the opener, including a rare fight by Malkin, on an eight-day layoff, stressing there was no need to panic.Might be time to start now.The last 16 teams to go up 2-0 in the conference finals have advanced to the Cup Finals. The Penguins managed to escape a 2-0 hole against the Bruins in 1991 on their way to the franchise’s first championship.These days Mario Lemieux is relegated to watching from the owner’s box. At the moment, the view isn’t pretty.Marchand took advantage of a sloppy play by Crosby to give Boston the lead just 28 seconds into the game. Crosby attempted to flip a bouncing puck back into Boston’s zone. Marchand casually flipped it out of the air, then streaked in on Vokoun before putting a wrist shot over Vokoun’s glove.The Bruins – and Marchand – were just getting started.Boston poured in two more goals to rattle the Stanley Cup favorites and end Vokoun’s run through the postseason. Not that Vokoun had much help from the guys in front of him.Kris Letang failed to clear the puck at the end of a Boston power play and Torey Krug kept it in and fired a slap shot at the net. Neither Vokoun, Letang or Paul Martin could grab it and Horton reached down and tapped it in between a sea of sticks to make it 2-0.