Team not up for letdown

Learns key lesson off the ice

Not every hockey player is a consumer of the sport when he punches out after a day at the rink. And during the playoffs, some players like to take a mental timeout on the nights they’re not playing.

But when you’re young and excited about being a part of it, like Jake DeBrusk and Sean Kuraly, you can’t get enough of it. So after the Bruins dispatched the Maple Leafs in Game 1 Thursday night, the rookies hunkered down on their own to watch the Flyers-Penguins Game 2 on Friday night. What they saw was the Flyers flipping the script on the two-time defending champions. After being embarrassed in Game 1, the Flyers answered by taking Game 2 convincingly to snatch home-ice advantage away from the Penguins.

“For a young guy like me, to see that is good,” Kuraly said. “It was eyeopening.”

Said DeBrusk: “What I take from it was, as a road team, you want to go in and take one game. It was pretty impressive what Philly did. They brought their game in the second game. I expect the same thing from Toronto. We understand that and we have a lot of veterans in here who’ve talked about that.”

That was not going to happen to the Bruins last night, as they crushed the Leafs, 7-3.

With that sobering example on all their minds, the Bruins came out expecting a battle from Toronto.

It lasted a couple of shifts.

The Leafs came out, threw a couple of hits, held possession for a couple of minutes and then folded under the weight of the Bruins’ relentless attack that knocked the Leafs to the canvas before the first period was over. The B’s scored four times in less than 10 minutes in the middle of the first to not only capture Game 2, but re-establish themselves as the bona fide Stanley Cup contenders they looked like from mid-November through March.

Their recipe was pretty much the same as they used in their Game 1 victory. The best players showed up. So did the power play. Again, their physicality forced the Leafs to make multiple, costly mistakes. And once again, luck did not shine on the Leafs when they had a chance to change the complexion of the game early on.

David Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron and Torey Krug all notched multiple points in the first period. The B’s cashed in on both power plays in the first, putting them at 5-for-8 for the series through four periods of hockey.

And they had the Leafs’ heads spinning during the determining 10 minutes of the game. For the second contest in a row, Mike Babcock’s Leafs were whistled for too-many-men-on-the-ice.

On that first PP, with the B’s already up 1-0 on Pastrnak’s first of three goals, Kasperi Kapanen caught Krug napping in the neutral zone and grabbed the loose puck for a breakaway. He clanged the post to Tuukka Rask’s left. The B’s went back down the ice and DeBrusk jammed home a Krug feed and it was 2-0. When Kevan Miller fired a puck from the corner into the net, that was it for the Frederik Andersen, pulled for Curtis McElhinney.

But it didn’t stop the onslaught. The B’s threw their weight around in the first period. Miller crushed William Nylander early. And when Tim Schaller nailed speedster Mitch Marner with a heavy hit, veteran defenseman Ron Hainsey immediately started throwing punches. It was the right thing to do. And considering the way the Leafs were getting run out of the building, it might even have been the right time. It was just the wrong result. Hainsey got hit with the extra two minutes and, 11 seconds later, Rick Nash made it 4-0.

Game over. The B’s played two more periods that were a little too loose and a little careless to allow the Leafs to cling to life — that will no doubt be addressed before Game 3 — but Rask made some key saves to keep the Leafs at arm’s length.

The old adage in hockey is that a playoff series does not begin until the home team loses a game. And it’s true that there is still time for this series to change its tone when it shifts to Toronto tomorrow night.

But the B’s head north of the border with their home-ice advantage very much intact. And no matter what happens in Toronto, the first two games of this series gave little indication that the Leafs will be able to take that away from them.