BOSTON — The Boston Bruins know their hopes of getting back to Vancouver and a chance to win the Stanley Cup ride largely on how they play in front of the Canucks’ net.
Get traffic in front of goalie Roberto Luongo and start launching pucks his way. It’s a simple formula that helped the Bruins go 2-0 at home in the Stanley Cup finals, but hasn’t translated north of the border.
“Our net-front presence definitely caused problems for them in our two games here,” Boston center Gregory Campbell said. “Even before that, it’s worked for us in the last three rounds, too. If he can’t see the puck, he can’t stop it, so we want to keep doing it.”
Luongo has been a stalwart at home but suspect on the road in the series, which Vancouver leads 3-2 entering Game 6 Monday night in Boston. Two of his three wins in the finals have been shutouts, but he allowed a dozen goals in games 3 and 4 in Boston last week.
One of them was on the power play when Michael Ryder scored on Luongo with Campbell providing a great screen in front during Boston’s 8-1 rout that cut Vancouver’s series lead to 2-1.
“Obviously he’s proved that he’s a great goalie his whole career and he’s going to stop the puck if he sees it,” Bruins forward Patrice Bergeron said. “I think traffic in front is something that needs to be a lot better.”
The Bruins spent part of Sunday’s practice digging pucks out of the corner and jostling in front of the net, preparing for Monday night as they try to avoid seeing the season end at home with the visitors skating off with the puck.
No matter how well Boston goalie Tim Thomas has been playing, he needs at least a little offensive support. The margin of each of Vancouver’s wins in the series has been just one goal.
“We need to get to the front of the net and win battles,” Boston coach Claude Julien said. “If you’re going to score goals, you have to win those battles and you have to put the pucks in the net and be there.”
That’s not exactly a new strategy in hockey. Teams — especially ones such as Boston that struggled early in the playoffs on the power play — often speak of getting more shots on net and having people in front while trying to generate offense. It was a focus for all three games in Vancouver, too, and the Bruins scored just twice in three games there.
Vancouver’s 1-0 win in Game 5 put Boston on the brink of elimination instead of just one win from claiming its first Stanley Cup since 1972. Just one goal could have changed the outcome, but the Bruins could get nothing past Luongo.
“We did some good things, but we need to get back to creating traffic and creating problems for them in front,” forward Rich Peverley said.
Bruins fans will be ready to deride Luongo once again Monday. He was pulled after the final goal of Boston’s 4-0 shutout to tie the series after allowing eight in the previous game.
Luongo wasn’t sure what caused him to miss so many saves in those games, but said he knows he will see plenty of black sweaters trying to block his view and rattle his psyche however they can.
“That’s the way you score in this league. You’ve got to get gritty. You’ve got to the hard areas, whack away at rebounds, tips, screens, all that kind of stuff,” Luongo said. “Especially when a team plays good defensively. You’ve got to get your noses dirty to get some goals. So for me, nothing changes.”
CROSSING LINES?: Identical twins Daniel and Henrik Sedin have heard no shortage of criticism during their NHL career in Vancouver, including catcalls from Canucks fans like “Sedin sisters” or the “Twinkies.” They’ve admitted having each other was the only thing that allowed them to survive some early struggles and high expectations from being the second and third picks in 1999.
So why, coming off consecutive scoring titles and one win from the Stanley Cup, are the Sedins upset that Mike Milbury, an ex-Bruins coach and former Islanders general manager now working as an analyst for NBC and Versus, called them “Thelma and Louise,” two female characters played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in a movie of the same name?
It certainly didn’t help that Henrik heard about it from his son, who told him a man was making fun of him and “uncle Danny” on television.
“If you criticize us, that’s OK, we know we have to play better’” Henrik Sedin said Saturday. “A lot of times in our career we have been criticized. But when you make fun of us on TV, that’s what you do when you are kids, not when you are grown up. That’s too bad, but apparently he keeps doing what he does.”
The Sedins, who combined for 198 points in the regular season, only have two in the Stanley Cup finals — a goal and assist by NHL scoring champion and Hart Trophy candidate Daniel in Game 2. The Canucks lead the series 3-2, in part because Vezina Trophy candidate Roberto Luongo has allowed only two goals and has two shutouts in three home games.
As several Canucks pointed out since the “Thelma and Louise” comments, Milbury traded both Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara and Luongo while running the Islanders. He sent Chara and a second-round pick that became Jason Spezza to Ottawa for Alexei Yashin, and dealt Luongo and Olli Jokinen to Florida for Oleg Kvasha and Mark Parrish.
THE CUP’S IN THE HOUSE: The Stanley Cup will be in TD Garden on Monday night in case the Vancouver Canucks win. If they do, they’ll skate around with it in front of a full house of disappointed Boston fans.
That would be an ugly sight for the Bruins.
“We want to be the ones to lift the Cup,” Boston forward Brad Marchand said. “We want to fight as hard as we possibly can to make sure that happens. We know that if that’s going to happen, we have to win the next game. So we just have to make sure that we do our best to make that possible.”
The Bruins dominated their first two home games in the series, winning 8-1 and 4-0.
But Boston defenseman Andrew Ference isn’t sure there’s a real home-ice advantage.
“Every game has it’s own developments, it’s own kind of character,” he said. “I’ve never put a whole lot of weight into home-ice advantage but I could be totally wrong. Really, who am I to say? All I know is, personally how I feel at away rinks and home rinks. And it’s not a whole lot different.”
BUCKNER MEMORIES — Maybe it was the opponent, but with lots of time to reflect on totally whiffing on his 15-shoot shot at a wide open net, Canucks fourth-line winger Tanner Glass thought only of Bill Buckner, whose fielding error in Game 6 was one of several mistakes by the Red Sox that helped the New York Mets win the 1986 World Series.
“I had lot of time between periods and I just saw that ground ball going through his legs,” said Glass, a history major while playing college hockey at Dartmouth. “I was just like ‘That can’t be me, it just can’t be.’”
It might have been him if not for Maxim Lapierre scoring the only goal 4:35 into the third period of Vancouver’s 1-0 win Friday night that gave it a 3-2 win over the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals. That goal came almost 12 minutes of playing time and an intermission after Glass missed the puck completely with Tim Thomas stranded atop his crease on the other side.
“You’ve got to expect (the pass), especially on Tim Thomas,” Glass said. “That backdoor play is such a good play, but you miss and it’s a terrible few minutes trying to clear your mind.”
MISSING HORTON: Nathan Horton scored the goals that won the seventh game of Boston’s first-round series against the Montreal Canadiens and third-round series against the Tampa Bay Lightning.
But he was sidelined for the finals by a severe concussion when he was hit by Vancouver defenseman Aaron Rome during the first period of Game 3.
Now the Bruins must depend on someone else to score a game-winner.
“We didn’t say ‘Horts, you go score the goal,’” coach Claude Julien said to laughter at his news conference Saturday. “I believe in this group of guys and we’ve been through a lot. We lost Nathan at the beginning of the third game here and we did extremely well getting ourselves back into the series. He’s a big part of our hockey club and we miss him. We can’t overlook that fact.
“But (the Canucks) have injuries as well and we don’t look for excuses. We feel right now we have a team that can compete right till the end and the only thing we have left to do is go out there and show it.”