Sens squander chance to put the Bruins away
Instead of sending the Boston Bruins into an early spring Friday night, the Ottawa Senators will be packing up for another trip back to Beantown Saturday.
Instead of booking a ticket to Round 2 of the NHL playoffs, the Senators are left with more work to do after they squandered a 2-0 second-period lead and dropped a dramatic 3-2 decision to the Bruins in double overtime. The result, in front of 19,209 at Canadian Tire Centre, allowed Boston to cut Ottawa’s series lead to 3-2.
Sean Kuraly scored his second goal of the game at 10:19 of the second OT period to give the Bruins the win and the Senators don’t have a lot of time to recover with Game 6 set for Sunday at 3 p.m. at TD Garden.
The Bruins had what looked like a game-winning goal by Noel Acciari called back at 14:25 of the first OT because it was ruled Senators goaltender Craig Anderson was interfered with by Kuraly crashing into him. The review took five minutes, but the officials had ruled it no goal on the ice and the call stood, so play went on.
There was a second review when Jean-Gabriel Pageau pushed a puck off the goal-line with his glove with 4:39 left in the first extra period and it was ruled the puck never crossed the line. Naturally, the Bruins were livid they didn’t get a penalty shot.
While Mark Stone and Pageau scored on Tuukka Rask in regulation to build a 2-0 lead, Kuraly and David Pastrnak erased the two-goal deficit with goals in the second period. The game stayed deadlocked through the third period, so the two teams went to overtime for the third time in the series.
The Senators had two power plays in the final six minutes and couldn’t score on either of them. They didn’t make the Bruins pay for a too many men on the ice penalty with 2:28 left and a puck over the glass infraction called on Dominic Moore.
Battling for their playoff lives, the Bruins came out hard in the third and pushed the pace big time. The Senators were on their heels and that wasn’t the case for most of the first four games of this series. Mike Hoffman got Ottawa’s first shot of the period at 10:46, which went through Rask and just dribbled wide.
No lead has been safe in this series and this night was no different.
After pulling out to a 2-0 lead early in the second, the Senators let it slip away when Kuraly tied it up at 17:05 of the second. From behind the net, his attempt to bank the puck off Anderson hit Chris Wideman’s stick and it deflected in to tie it up 2-2 after 40 minutes.
At that point, the building was sitting in stunned silence.
The Bruins got on the board when Anderson initially stopped Patrice Bergeron’s wraparound attempt, but Pastrnak was there to deposit it home at 8:40 to pull the Bruins to within a goal. It came not long after Clarke MacArthur missed a golden opportunity to make it 3-0 and fanned on his shot.
Only 30 seconds into the second, the Senators pulled out to a 2-0 lead when Pageau scored his first of the playoffs to end a 17game scoreless skid. He took a breakaway pass from Viktor Stalberg and beat Rask through the five-hole. Not long afterward, the crowd struck up a “Pageau, Pageau, Pageau” chant.
There hasn’t been a whole lot to cheer about for either team in the first period of this series with only three goals — and one of those came Friday as the Senators pulled out to a 1-0 lead through 20 minutes and outshot the Bruins 10-6.
You could see the sense of relief on Stone’s face as he opened the scoring at 11:19 of the first. He took an excellent pass from Hoffman to send him in alone and then beat Rask with a backhander on the stick side. Not only was that his first career playoff goal, it ended a 19-game slump that stretched back to Feb. 19.
Until then, this game hadn’t really lived up to the kind of start everybody thought it would.