1/19 Bruins 2 – Rangers 3
Much like the NFL, the NHL has a mandatory bye week at some point in the season, and it can almost be anywhere in the season. The Bruins lucked out in my opinion having their bye week on the same week that leads into the All-Star game. While they have a week to get rested up, most teams continue to grind it out only to have a few days off during the league wide break. As great as the rest is for a team that has struggled fighting the injury bug this season, it comes with no better time as Tuukka Rask is battling a concussion stemming from this game.
Tuukka Rask has been one of the hottest goalies in the NHL through the months of December and January and this injury could be a lot worse than it appears. If you missed it, Tuukka Rask took a very scary hit in this game when the Rangers’ Filip Chytil raced in on net with the puck and got bumped into Rask at full speed. What made it worse is that the main point of contact on Tuukka was to the head as his mask went flying off and his head went into the post. It took him a while to get up and he obviously had to come out of the game being replaced by Jaroslav Halak. If Tuukka had not been injured in this game, it’s not a guarantee that the Bruins would have won, but they would have had a better chance as Halak struggled.
The Bruins scored the game’s first goal in this one as Danton Heinen was able to beat Henrik Lundqvist with about two and a half minutes to play in the first period. It was then only about a minute later when Tuukka went down as Chytil crashed into him while putting the puck in the net behind him.
The Rangers would be the only team to score in the second period to make it a 2-1 game heading into the third period. It took just over three minutes into the third for the Bruins to tie it as Brad Marchand got on the board. Unfortunately, the Bruins would give up a power play goal to the Rangers about halfway through the period in which the B’s could not recover from and tie the game once again.
While it is unfortunate that the Bruins lost their last game before the bye week and all-star break, then will take advantage of the much needed time off to rest up and get set for the unofficial second half of the season in which a big playoff push is coming. With that being said, watch out for the trade deadline on February 25th where the Bruins may make some surprising moves to try and bolster their roster for another Stanley Cup run.
The Week Ahead
As I stated earlier, the NHL All-Star weekend is next up so the Bruins will be out of action for a few more days. All except for David Pastrnak who will be participating in the first All-Star game of his career, with hopefully many more to come. Coming out of the All-Star break the Bruins will get back to action on Tuesday 1/29 as the Winnipeg Jets come to Boston. This is going to be a great matchup of teams both likely to make the playoffs and realistically could be a Stanley Cup Final preview.
The Bruins will then take on the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday 1/31 at 7pm in Boston once again. This could be an important game for the B’s as they lost horribly to this struggling team last time around and they need to get some revenge.
Videos courtesy of NHL.com