On Wednesday night, two of the NHL’s best teams, the Boston Bruins (34-12-11) and Edmonton Oilers (33-18-2), met in what many fans believed to be a preview of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final. Naturally, when two of the league’s most gifted offenses meet, they are never dull affairs, with this contest going into overtime and the Bruins’ Charlie McAvoy giving the visitors a 6-5 win.
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Considering Boston was already without defenseman Hampus Lindholm, the team lost another skater when Matt Grzelyck departed the game after falling hard into the boards just a couple of shifts into the contest. Unexpectedly, things almost worsened when McAvoy also went down in the first period on a hit by Zach Hyman. Still, thankfully, he stayed in the game and netted the winner in the same fashion that he ended the shootout on Monday against the Dallas Stars.
After blowing a 4-2 and 5-4 third-period lead, the Bruins don’t have much time to rest and regroup as they are back on the ice Thursday night in Calgary, looking to avenge a 4-1 loss from two weeks ago. Although the Oilers and Flames are entirely different teams with their playing styles, there are a few things worth noting from the 6-5 victory in northern Alberta before the Bruins wrap up a back-to-back in the Canadian province.
Mason Lohrei Makes Immediate Impact
Ahead of their departure from Boston to the West Coast, where the team will play four games in six nights, the Bruins recalled 23-year-old Mason Lohrei from Providence. The rookie, who played 27 games during his previous stint with the club, had six points while averaging 16:40 of ice time.
During his first game back, he had three points (assists) while skating the third-most minutes of anyone in the lineup at 23:32. Of course, the uptick in ice time was because the Bruins were down to only five defenders, but either way, Lohrei has earned this opportunity thanks to his confident play with and without the puck.
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Considering the Oilers have Connor McDavid (85 points), Leon Draisaitl (64 points), and Hyman (34 goals), the Bruins defender never looked out of place on the ice and finished the game with a plus-two rating, the best total of anyone in the Boston lineup. Moreover, the team is now 16-6-6 with him in the lineup.
Swayman Earns Rare Back-to-Back Start
Head coach Jim Montgomery has done his best to keep Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark in a rotation where each netminder alternates starts. After picking up a 4-3 shootout victory over the Stars on Monday, it was assumed that Ullmark would play in Edmonton and Swayman would draw the Flames.
However, Montgomery flipped the script and let Swayman start consecutive games for the first time in over a month. When Ullmark went down with an injury in Arizona on Jan. 9, Swayman was thrust into action, losing that game in overtime before starting the next five contests and earning a 4-0-2 record.
Swayman fought off many chances against the Oilers in close as the home team did their best to crash the net and make the Bruins goalie work hard to cover the blue paint. Despite the star power in the Edmonton lineup, it was the workhorse players, Warren Foegele, Hyman, Mattias Janmark, and Corey Perry, who beat him, as he denied the leading scorers McDavid and Draisaitl all night.
According to a Sportsnet graphic heading into the overtime session, the Oilers had 94 shot attempts, with 40 making their way to Swayman. Even though it appeared to be a relatively routine night, with 20 saves, after 40 minutes, Edmonton turned up the pace in the third with 18 shots, netting three goals in one of their biggest comebacks of the season.
However, Swayman was up to the task and had the game’s best save in overtime, robbing Draisaitl of the winner while the Bruins were killing a penalty. As brilliant as he was against the Stars on Monday, he was even better on Wednesday against the league’s eighth-highest-scoring team.
They Are Not Pretty, but a Win Is a Win
After a subpar homestand (2-3-2) where the Bruins lost a couple of games to teams who will most likely not participate in the Stanley Cup playoffs, they needed to scrape themselves off the mat in a must-win situation on Monday against the Stars. They went nine rounds into the shootout to get that extra point, and that confidence carried over into Wednesday night’s game.
Uncharacteristically, they began a pivotal West Coast road trip by blowing two third-period leads and salvaged the evening by getting an overtime winner from a defenseman who used the same move two days before to win a shootout.
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Once Boston lost Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci and signed some older veteran players to fill in the gaps, many people wrote the team off, saying they’d be lucky to qualify for the playoffs as a wild card team. However, they have defied the odds all season and handled adversity in stride, just like the 2022-23 season.
They are battling through arguably the most brutal stretch of Montgomery’s tenure, which only started in September 2022. Whether it’s injuries, miscues, or lack of shots on goal, the Bruins have shown in the past two games that they are resilient and have the skills to win one-goal games, whether 6-5 or 4-3.
Moreover, unlike last season, where they ran away with the Atlantic Division and Presidents’ Trophy, they have some competition in the Florida Panthers and Vancouver Canucks, two teams that are forcing the Bruins to earn every single point they get because those clubs want what they’ve had for the past year and a half, unheralded success.
At this stage of the season, the wins and points matter most. It doesn’t matter how they happen, whether the final score is 9-8 or 1-0; it just matters that Boston continues to do the things that get them points, especially against non-playoff teams like the Flames and Seattle Kraken. In the end, people will remember their end-of-the-season wins and points totals while forgetting all the highs and lows that get them into the playoffs.
As proven countless times before, no one waltzes to the Stanley Cup. It is one of the hardest-earned trophies in sports, and if the Bruins keep gutting it out in the regular season, they will be more equipped to handle the pressures of the postseason.
What’s Next for the Bruins
As mentioned, Boston is in Calgary on Thursday night for a showdown with a Flames team desperate for points to stay in the wild-card race. This contest will be the second and final meeting of the season between the two teams, with Calgary earning a 4-1 victory at TD Garden on Feb. 6.
