Following a Tuesday road victory, the Boston Bruins have snatched the home-ice advantage away from the Buffalo Sabres in their Eastern Conference first-round series.<\/p>\n
That means the intense playoff feeling is alive and well as the scene shifts to Boston on Thursday night for Game 3 of the best-of-seven series.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like it was nasty from the first shift, from the first game,\u201d Bruins defenseman Nikita Zadorov said after Tuesday\u2019s physical battle which featured 94 penalty minutes, including 72 in the third period alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s playoff emotions and intensity. It\u2019s always going to be up there.\u201d<\/p>\n
First-year Bruins coach Marco Sturm was not completely dissatisfied with his team\u2019s Game 1 performance, outside of Buffalo\u2019s third-period rally to snag a 4-3 win.<\/p>\n
But on Tuesday, the Bruins were 4-2 winners, responding to the loss with a rock-solid effort in front of goaltender Jeremy Swayman, who boasts a .932 save percentage through two games in the series.<\/p>\n
Viktor Arvidsson netted two goals, including the opener of Boston\u2019s three-goal second period that built a lead it would never relinquish. Morgan Geekie and Arvidsson\u2019s linemate Pavel Zacha also scored.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did a lot of good things. We played our style of hockey, I would say definitely more than Game 1,\u201d Sturm said. \u201cOverall, it was a good game, but at the end of the day, it was only one game. \u2026 We\u2019re gonna regroup, fly home and try to do the same thing at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the second-line trio of former Sabre Casey Mittelstadt, Zacha and Arvidsson, the strong effort followed a challenge from Sturm to get back to their hard-nosed style of play, matching that of the team. They delivered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just needed a poke, that\u2019s all,\u201d Sturm said. \u201cKnowing \u2018Arvy\u2019 very well, he\u2019s a guy who takes it very seriously and takes it to heart. I knew he was going to have a big night.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bruins will be looking for a repeat type of effort as the series resumes. Meanwhile, the Sabres have questions to answer if they want to get back into it.<\/p>\n
The biggest is the team\u2019s goaltending situation, as Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen was pulled in favor of Alex Lyon after allowing four goals on 20 shots.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust felt that there may be a chance we\u2019re going to need (Lyon),\u201d Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said of the pull. \u201cMay play him next game, but just get him a period because he hasn\u2019t played in a while.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lyon had not seen game action since April 4.<\/p>\n
The second goal against Luukkonen was Geekie\u2019s backhand lob from beyond center ice. If the momentum had not been on Boston\u2019s side yet, that one turned it all the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn those situations, if there\u2019s a bad bounce, bad goal, you kind of have to stop the bleeding,\u201d Luukkonen said. \u201cWasn\u2019t able to do that (Tuesday).\u201d<\/p>\n
Buffalo did make things interesting in the waning minutes of regulation. Back-to-back goals by defenseman Bowen Byram and Peyton Krebs cut the deficit to 4-2 with 4:52 left.<\/p>\n
A major reason for the struggles was another scoreless power-play night. Despite an overall shot advantage for the second straight game in the series at 35-27, the man-up unit was 0-for-5 on Tuesday and dropped to 0-for-31 over the last nine games.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ll have to tweak some things,\u201d Ruff said. \u201cI think if you look at the last power play, we went with a little bit of a different look. \u2026 We had a scheme that we thought maybe would work a little bit better. I like the amount of shots we generated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following a Tuesday road victory, the Boston Bruins have snatched the home-ice advantage away from the Buffalo Sabres…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5099],"tags":[154,95,5132,530,5,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-558203","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-bruins","8":"tag-boston","9":"tag-boston-bruins","10":"tag-bostonbruins","11":"tag-bruins","12":"tag-hockey","13":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116450222582103960","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}