Boucher looks for Senators to rebound
OTTAWA — The Ottawa Senators carried a little extra baggage onto their plane for Boston on Saturday afternoon.
The Senators had a chance to win its best-of-seven quarter-final series against the Bruins in five games Friday night, but instead lost 3-2 in double-overtime, allowing Boston to claw its way back into the series.
Ottawa leads the series 3-2 and will look to eliminate Boston this afternoon.
“I told the players the No. 1 asset that everybody has to have is the ability to rebound right away after the game,” Senators coach Guy Boucher said.
“There’s no time to linger on games that you win or that you lose. [Today is] going to be the same type of game, it’s going to be an equal game again and it’s going to go down to the wire, and we know that.”
One area of concern for the Senators could be its inability to hold leads. Ottawa held a 3-0 lead in Game 3 and a 2-0 lead in Game 5 and twice the Bruins came back to force overtime.
“They’re a good team and I think they’ve proven that throughout this whole series,” said Ottawa defenceman Erik Karlsson. “They made it really tough for us, it’s been tight games. It’s all been one-goal games so we know they’re not going to give up and we’re not going to give up either.
“Whether we take the lead or not, we’re going to play the same way we have and we knew it’s not going to be easy. We definitely did not expect to win four straight, even though we did everything we could and we definitely had the chances to close it out, but, again, someone’s going to get the bounce and I feel like we’ve been getting them lately and, unfortunately, they got it [Friday] night.”
Physically, both teams will be tested. Friday’s game lasted four hours and six minutes. Bruins captain Zdeno Chara led his team playing 36:46, while Karlsson led all players with 41:51 minutes of ice.
With the early start today, players realize fatigue could be a factor.
“We’re going to have to keep it simple and limit the mistakes throughout the first period and continuing through the whole game,” said Senators forward Mike Hoffman. “I think that’s going to be the biggest key.”
Ottawa is undefeated at TD Garden this season, winning both regular-season games and the first two road games of this series.
“I don’t think we think about it at this point, during the regular season that’s one thing,” said Marc Methot.
“Sure, we grabbed a couple games on the road here this series, but it’s a different ball game now I think. With only a couple potential games left we’d love to close this out as soon as we can.”