Of Garden Avalanche
Rask simply not up to the task
One of the crazier Bruins team statistics of recent vintage — actually, not all that vintage, since it goes back nearly two decades — is their record at home against the Colorado Avalanche.
Over the past dozen Bruins-Avs matchups on Causeway St., the visiting team is un- beaten at 110-1 with the B’s last victory on March 30, 1998, when, for instance, rookie Anders Bjork was 2.
Take a peek at Tuukka Rask’s career performance against Colorado before the teams faced off yesterday afternoon at the Garden, and he, too, had a fairly curious stat line: He was a grim 1-4-1 vs. the Avs but with a stellar 1.83 goals against and .937 save percentage.
The obvious analysis was that he, unlike his teammates, did his job in those games.
Such was not the case yesterday as the Avalanche continued their bizarre dominance of the Bruins with a 4-0 victory at the Garden. It was day on which the B’s were neither in high-tone emotionally nor sharp with the puck.
And for Rask, it was not exactly a Vezina Trophy kind of showing.
“Well,” said Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy when asked about his goalie. “Like a lot of our guys, it wasn’t our A game. Just not enough A games in the group. When we break down, that’s what the goaltender is for: To pick you up. And if he misses one, or (there is) one that you could say he wants back or whatever the case, then you’ve got to go out and score. It goes both ways. We’ve got to pick him up; he’s got to pick us up. We didn’t do that.”
The problems for Rask began on the game’s first shot, a soft, off-wing wrister tossed on net by Colorado’s Sven Andrighetto from near the right hashmark 4:41 in. Rask kind of boxed at the high shot and had it carom off his glove, drop behind him and slide in.
Rask’s self-analysis wasn’t too harsh.
“I stopped it, but somehow it deflected in,” he said with a shrug.
Rask was more critical about the second Colorado goal, a shorthanded score by J.T. Compher that made it 2-0 at 13:24 of the first. On the play, the B’s got three skaters caught on the wrong side in the attacking zone and the Avs broke out 2-on-1. Ex-Bruin Carl Soderberg fed cross-ice to Compher, who sniped a forehander from the right circle, high short-side.
“That second one was more a my bad,” said Rask. “I wasn’t square to the puck. The first one there wasn’t really more you could do on that. (But on the second goal) I wasn’t square to the puck. It ricocheted in off my shoulder. I saw the replay and I just wasn’t square. That was (a shot) I probably should have saved.”
And then came the play on which there was no ambiguity in assessing blame and which effectively settled the outcome: At 6:07 of Period 3, a puck was dumped into the B’s zone and Rask skated out to the right circle to try and reach it. But he lost the race to speedy, former No. 1 overall pick Nail Yakupov, who got the puck and slid it into the unguarded net, making it 3-0.
“I should have watched closely that it was Yakupov,” said Rask. “He’s pretty quick. I just couldn’t beat him, that’s all. It’s a splitsecond decision. You see you have a chance for the puck and you go for it. You’re just trying to make a play and give the puck to your own team. I didn’t do it, obviously, so that’s all you can really say about that.”
Still, as in so many other Bruins-Avalanche games here, the fault did not lie with one player. Heading out on a three-game trip that opens tomorrow night in Denver, the B’s, as a team, must be a lot better.
“We didn’t give them much, but it seemed like they had a lot of quality opportunities,” said Rask. “We just needed that greasy (goal). We never got it. Just one of those games (we) never really had the drive to make that push. It was just one of those games that ever got anything going.
“We have to grow as a team as we move along. We have to develop a certain style of hockey we want to play. The first game (win) was more an example of what we want to look like than (yesterday).”