RASK BACK ON TASK
Pushes poor Game 7 aside to net wild win in opener vs. Bolts
TAMPA — If you asked Bruins fans what they feared the most about the team’s second-round series, few would have mentioned the offensive weapons the Tampa Bay Lightning possess.
No, the one player many fans — and a few sportswriters, to be fair — were concerned about was Bruins goaltender Tuukka Rask. He was coming off a shaky performance in the B’s emotional Game 7 victory over the Maple Leafs. In fact, after stealing Game 4 in Toronto, he was so-so at best in Games 5, 6 and 7, leaving him with a below average .899 save percentage.
But yesterday at Amalie Arena, Rask was able to hit the reset button and come up with a strong performance that helped the B’s to a 6-2 win over the Bolts in Game 1. But that might just get lost since 1) the Bruins scored six goals and 2) the Rask highlight that will be played over and over again will be of the first class nutty he threw at 13:22 of the second period.
With the B’s playing with a 3-1 lead, Tampa Bay was given a power play on one of two ticky-tack penalties on Jake DeBrusk. On the PP, Rask’s left skate blade popped off when a shot hit it. The puck was out on the perimeter and Rask repeatedly screamed to get the officials’ attention while he frantically peglegged his way around the crease. Eventually, Mikhail Sergachev took advantage of Rask’s greatly impaired mobility to send a shot from the blue line past him to make it 3-2.
Infuriated, Rask hobbled off to pick up the useless skate blade, held up the damning piece of evidence for the world to see and then chucked it into an open space of ice. He appeared to be in full meltdown mode. But then after the goal was registered on the scoreboard and the 19,092 in attendance were rocking, he went to the bench to get his skate repaired. When he returned to the cage, a cooler Rask did not let another goal past him. He made 34 stops in all for his best outing of the playoffs thus far.
“That’s the biggest thing for a goalie in any case when you let in a goal. You just have to let it go and focus on the next shot,” said Rask. “When it’s a weird play like that, it’s tougher to stay focused. But I kept battling and lucky it didn’t make a difference in the game.”
No one seemed to know the rule at the time, including the officials. Rask said one of the refs told him if he had seen the skate blade had come off, he would have blown it dead. But that would not have been the correct thing to do, according to the NHL.
According to a league release in response to the incident, “There is no rule for referees to stop play for a broken piece of equipment, regardless of whether the equipment belongs to a goaltender or a skater. The lone exception is when referees may stop play after a goaltender has lost his helmet (as outlined in Rule 9.6).”
On occasion, Rask does lose it — and it’s not always a bad thing. As a kid in Providence, he became a YouTube star after his infamous milk crate-throwing incident. But more recently, in a game against the Lightning at the Garden on March 29, Rask went after the Bolts’ Cedric Paquette with his blocker when he felt the forward had taken liberties. That catapulted the B’s to an emotional win. And yesterday, his teammates didn’t mind seeing him getting fired up.
“Any time you get emotional like that and attached to the game like he was, it gives you extra energy and I thought he was great. It was fun to watch, I guess. I wasn’t sure if he should have thrown that skate blade. I was like ‘No, don’t do that,’” said Patrice Bergeron with a laugh. “But at least nobody was around. It was nice to see that emotion out of him and the way he stepped up in that game. It definitely gives us a lot of confidence.”
Rask said he knew what he was doing with the blade toss.
“I didn’t throw it at anyone,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure everyone saw that my blade was off.”
But the bottom line is that Rask and the B’s have accomplished at least part of their mission here, immediately seizing home-ice advantage with a road victory. And Rask erased the memory of that Game 7 performance against Toronto, at least for one day anyway.
“It’s a new series and you try to come out on top in the first game, try to get a lead and that’s what my focus was,” said Rask. “And like every game, I just tried to give my team a chance to win. We knew that they’d come out hard in the first and we’d have to try to weather the storm and gain the lead, And that’s what we did.”