In Toronto, the Boston Bruins finally got a win in the post season. Boston entered their first round series with the Carolina Hurricanes winless in three round robin games.
On Wednesday, in a postponed game from Tuesday night, the Bruins’ Patrice Bergeron struck for the game-winner at 1:13 of the second extra session for a 4-3 win over the Canes.
“We’ve seen that goal a lot of times,” Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy said. “It’s to [Bergeron] in the middle where he chips it to [ David Pastrnak ] and [he] is the one zipping it. But that is the beauty of that line, is they can all make the plays and they can all finish.”
Tuukka Rask made 25 saves to get the win for Boston.
“We’re a confident group, confident line,” Bergeron said. “I think we got better as we went on in the round-robin. Obviously you want more, you want to keep getting better and taking the next step, especially we thought that tonight was a really important game, starting round one, so we had to put whatever was behind us in the past and get some rhythm going.
“When things are going well, at times you get complacent and you don’t work on things you need to work on. Obviously, you want things to go well all the time, that’s a perfect scenario. We’re able to look at video and look at the areas that we can get better at. I thought as a team we did that throughout the round-robin and now it’s behind us.”
The two teams traded goals in each period of regulation with Joel Edmundson, Brock McGinn and Haydn Fleury as the Canes’ strikers.
“Anytime you lose in the Playoffs, especially in overtime, it’s obviously a stinger,” Hurricanes head coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “When you lose a game like that you definitely don’t want to marinate on it too long, so we got a chance to come back and play right away. I think that’s good, especially, like I said, we’ve been sitting for so long. We’ll try to shore up a couple of things and then just get back at it.”
Fleury forced the extra time with a goal at the midway point of the third period for a 3-3 tie.
“You don’t expect that and things change, you’ve got to adjust,” Coyle said. “That’s kind of our mindset anyways coming into this whole thing with all the new changes and the new normal going on. You’ve got to adjust to things. That was kind of our mindset. We had to play this morning. Then go home, get a good night’s sleep, get some food in you, and come back and be ready to play for this morning. That’s kind of how we went about it.”
Carolina had swept through the qualifying round to end up with the fifth seed.
David Pastrnak, Charlie Coyle and David Krejci had the Bruins’ regulation markers.
“Playoff momentum changes pretty quickly,” Krejci said. “Like they always say, never too high, never too low, correct some mistakes, look at some positives, improve on those and move on.”
[WATCH: All Bruins vs. Hurricanes highlights]
Petr Mrazek made 36 saves in the loss.
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