Last spring, Boston was captivated by the Bruins, who went on a magical run to win the Stanley Cup for the first time in 39 years. 2010-2011 was fantastic, but now the team’s focus has moved on to defending the title and hopefully raising another banner. The team has been intense so far in training camp. Head coach Claude Julien said, “It’s nice to see those guys pretty intense and obviously in the battle drills it shows more and even in the passing/shooting drills the guys are skating pretty well, but we’ve got to be careful here also. Fatigue can set in pretty quickly after you’ve had a tough physical testing one day and had a pretty good skate yesterday and another one today so we’ve got five games coming up.” There is no reason that the team can’t repeat, although they did lose some major pieces like Tomas Kaberle and Marc Recchi. Tim Thomas is coming off a huge season and he looked good at points of his preseason debut on Friday, which the Bruins won 6-3.
There is always a debate about weather or not a preseason game counts for anything. Obviously Rich Peverly believes it does, because in his TD Garden debut for the year he played as if he was fighting for the cup again. With 4 minutes to go in the game, he punctuated a high energy effort with an illusion of a goal scored while drifting across the red line. In the 6-3 win, Peverly had a point in all but one of the B’s goals, and he hit the post on another shot earlier. Peverly felt great about his 5 point clutch performance, which has put him into a good position to get a sport on the second line. He said, “Well I think we all know there’s competition there for that spot and obviously they play well together and I think nothing’s set in stone. And going forward here it could be anybody.”
Without Peverly, it’s very possible Boston would’ve been embarrassed in their first game in Boston since the cup triumph. The Islanders jumped out to a one nothing lead on the first shift when Dylan Reese banged a slapshot in off the post, sneaking it by Tim Thomas, who was seeing his first action of the preseason. The Bruins started showing life in the 2nd period. David Krejci scored at 8:17, and Patrice Bergeron scored off a fantastic feed from Brad Marchand 3 minutes later. Bergeron said, “Yeah, it was a great move. I knew it was going, when he got it- the puck- I knew it was going to come around the net and you know, I started to stop and get open for him for a one timer and it worked and like I said, you know we read off each other pretty well and I knew it was going to come around the net so I made it easy on both of us.” From that point on, with the match tied at 2, the B’s would outscore New York 4-1, they would also out-shoot NY 36-16.
The last half hour of the match were the same Bruins that won game 7 of the finals, they just needed a little coaxing out. It looks as if the B’s are in for another stellar year, and if anything, winning the cup has just made them hungrier to get back to the top of the mountain in 2012.