Bruins looking to keep sharp

BOSTON — The Bruins think they’ve found a way to stay sharp for the Stanley Cup Final while waiting a total of 10 days between games.

The Eastern Conference champions will hold a public intrasquad scrimmage on Thursday night, and coach Bruce Cassidy said he’ll try to maintain a regular game-day schedule so that the players will get back in the routine before the opener of the championship series on Monday.

“We’ve got some ideas we bandied around. We came up with this one,” Cassidy said on Tuesday, the Bruins’ fifth day off since sweeping the Hurricanes in the East finals. “We’ve had good practices, but this will be a little bit different.”

The Bruins needed seven games to dispatch the Maple Leafs in the opening round, then had one day off before starting the second round against the Blue Jackets. They finished off the Blue Jackets in six games, and had two days to rest before Game 1 against the Hurricanes.

But that series ended Thursday, and the Bruins haven’t even had an opponent to prepare for yet. The Blues took a 3-2 lead into Game 6 against the Sharks on Tuesday night.

“If St. Louis wins we can start a little bit of that prep for special teams,” Cassidy said. “If not, we’ll just go through the basics.”

Cassidy said last week he would reach out to other teams to get pointers on how to handle long layoffs. Among them: the Patriots, who routinely have a first-round bye, in addition to a two-week break before the Super Bowl.

The Bruins coach said that he touched base with all of the teams in town, as well as some of the players from the 2011 and ’13 teams that went to the Final and other NHL coaches who have had long breaks. But he declined to share their advice.

“We’ll take what we thought was relevant to us and go from there,” Cassidy said, acknowledging that a seven-game series is different than preparing for a Super Bowl. “In the first game, we want to be good. We want to be sharp. We want to be on time. We want to win. But we have a bit more luxury than say a one-and-done.”