Frustrated B’s sweat out off day

Come playoff time, full team practices become scarce, especially after an overtime game. The legs are to be saved for the real thing.

But after Monday’s bitter 4-3 overtime loss in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference first-round series with the Ottawa Senators, the Bruins opted yesterday to put every available healthy body on the Warrior Arena ice, in part to officially turn the page and focus on tonight’s Game 4 at the Garden.

“A little bit. Sometimes it’s good to go out and get a sweat on,” interim coach Bruce Cassidy said. “There were a couple of guys we talked to about taking the day off, who played a lot of minutes. They didn’t want it. There were a couple of things we needed to work on. I don’t think it was physically demanding today. And we had a day off before (Monday’s) game and I didn’t like our start. So just a little bit of a switch.”

If the B’s can’t pull out the “W” tonight, then there’s a good chance we’ve seen our last hockey game in Boston until the fall. They need to avoid being obsessed with the injudicious roughing penalty call on Riley Nash in OT that put the Senators on the power play and led to Bobby Ryan’s game-winning goal.

For Nash, it will take little more than a practice to cleanse his mind.

“I don’t think the slate’s going to be clean until we win another game and until we get back in this series and end it,” Nash said. “Until then, it’s going to be pretty painful and you’ve got to learn from it. Obviously not dwell on it, but learn from it. It just can’t happen again.”

Nash played 323 NHL games before seeing his first playoff action this year. He’ll take Monday’s experience as part of his education, hard knock-style though it may have been.

“It still hurts. You never want to be that guy at this time of year,” said Nash. “You’ve just got to learn from it. This is my first time in the postseason, maybe you’ve got to take that hit, you’ve got to take that punch. You hear a lot of guys say that. But once you’re in the heat of the battle. I thought we were in a lot of scrums (Monday) night. It’s been a very intense series through the first three games.

“It’s been a matter of toeing that line and going over that line. Obviously, (Monday) night I went a little bit over that line and it ended up hurting us. Hopefully you find that area where you’re aggressive enough, asserting your will on the game, but not going overboard where it starts hurting the team.”

Nash’s penalty hurt the team, no doubt, but there were other culprits in the loss. First off was the terrible start to which Cassidy alluded. He was still trying to put a finger on the reason for it.

“I don’t know if there’s an easy answer to that, to be honest,” Cassidy said. “The crowd’s obviously into it, you’re at home. Those sometimes can go either way. If you’re off and running and score first you can use that energy. But if not and things don’t go your way, you want to press, especially being at home and the crowd’s going and you think you’re capable of anything. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to stick with your game plan.

“Ottawa did a good job . . . I don’t have a perfect answer for why we were flat, but I do know we did recover. We got ourselves back in the game and that’s the important part. But we need to start better. It’s something we’ve done well at the Garden and it’s helped us a lot.”

There’s another aspect of this series to which the B’s have yet to find an answer: the brilliance of Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson.

“He’s an elite player. He plays half the game. He’s going to cause damage, but you have to limit the damage,” Cassidy said. “There’s a lot of ways he can beat you, so we’ve got to do a better job in neutralizing him. Be physical with him — he came off an injury — within the rules of the game and make him work through your body to get up ice. It makes him tougher on him over the course of two weeks. He might get you for one game, but you keep being heavy on him and it can wear on you. We have to look at that.”

If the B’s don’t figure out Ottawa soon, this series won’t last the two weeks.