Bruins impressively draw first blood against Florida

Like Han Solo, the Bruins clearly aren’t interested in anybody telling them the odds or what is stacked up against them in a playoff series. Instead, they got goals from a lot of different corners as Brandon Carlo and Mason Lohrei provided goal-scoring punch from the back end and Morgan Geekie and Justin Brazeau joined the offensive onslaught as well that ended with Jake DeBrusk kicking in the empty net score.

They looked an awful lot like the same Bruins team that took all four regular-season meetings with the Panthers ahead of this playoff series.

“I think our confidence has gone to another level after pushing through the first round,” said Jim Montgomery. “And I think that confidence makes you believe that you can [do it]. It’s a great place to be mentally.

“But we made a lot of mistakes. If it’s not for Jeremy Swayman it might have been a different story and they might have come out on top. We did not have a lot of scoring chances. The score was not indicative of the way the game went.”

It all actually sounds eerily similar to what the B’s bench boss was saying after Game 1 of the first-round series when the Bruins beat the Maple Leafs by the exact same 5-1 score when it was all over.

The Carlo and Lohrei goals, in particular, were beauties as they were both sniper shots right under, or off, the bar that Sergei Bobrovsky had zero chance of stopping once the B’s blueliners got a clean shooting look.

“I definitely wanted to play [in Game 1] and I’m very happy I did. It was an amazing 24 hours,” said Carlo, who arrived at the Florida arena a couple of hours before game time after being with his wife Mason for the birth of his son Crew in the wee hours of Monday morning. “I think [David Pastrnak] might have skated over and got that puck for me, that would be pretty special to have for sure, I don’t score very often so that was a really cool experience for me.

“[Charlie Coyle] got the puck with his head up and I saw a lot of open ice in the middle, so just trying to fill a pocket and he got his eyes up and saw me. I caught it and shot it. We’ve worked on that kind of play a lot like that in practice coming through the middle of the zone like that. It was a good goal for the momentum of the game, and we did a good job of continuing to push.”

All of that allowed the Bruins to build up a 3-1 lead going into the third period where possibly the most important sequence took place midway through the period.

The Panthers opened the third period outshooting the Bruins by an 11-1 margin as they tried to chip away at the B’s two-goal lead, and that prompted Jim Montgomery to call an unconventional timeout. Unconventional or not, it worked as the Bruins immediately responded with a strong shift and shortly afterward added a partial breakaway from Brazeau where he put a double-move on Bobrovsky that ended with an elevated backhander past the Panthers goaltender.

It really showed that Montgomery has his finger on the pulse of his Bruins team at this juncture of the postseason and is able to relay the message that’s received by the players at these elevated emotional moments.

“He knows the game so well and when to have our bench take a timeout. He has such a great sense of game management,” said Swayman of his fellow University of Maine alum in Jim Montgomery. “After that timeout you could tell the momentum shifted and I had no doubt that my guys were going to respond in the right way. To see the way they did it, it’s just a testament to the kind of group we have when it comes to staying in the moment and saying ‘Hey, let’s make the next shift our best shift.’

Beyond that, it was the same story for the Black and Gold with Swayman continuing to provide dazzlingly mistake-free play between the pipes. Swayman finished with 38 saves in the stunning victory where Boston scored five consecutive goals after Matthew Tkachuk got one past him in the first period to open up the scoring. He was at his best on the first shift of the game turning away an Anton Lundell scoring chance on a loose puck rebound at the net, and then again in the third period when he stopped 16 shots as the Panthers were throwing everything at him.

There is some caution here with the B’s getting to this kind of a start as this Black and Gold group has a habit of winning Game 1 of a series, particularly when the other team is coming off a week-long layoff as the Panthers were headed into Monday night’s game. In fact, the Bruins have won the first game in six of the last seven postseasons in the round where they eventually got eliminated, with the 2022 series against the Carolina Hurricanes as the lone outlier where they dropped the first game of that series.

It's all to say that a fast start to this second-round playoff series is an encouraging sign, but nobody should get carried away with the B’s against a proud, talented Panthers bunch that’s going to respond to this resounding defeat. There’s a whole lot of series to go, but full credit to the Bruins for stepping up and taking advantage of a Panthers team that wasn’t able to capitalize on a ton of their top-end scoring chances.

Boston hasn’t received close to Florida’s best punch in this series, but they could very well be getting it in Wednesday night’s Game 2 with an important player like Sam Bennett possibly joining in the series sooner rather than later.