The Bruins beat the Canadiens in the first round in overtime of a Game 7. The win jump-started their Stanley Cup run that season. (Getty Images)
You could learn a thing or two about physics in a number of ways.
You could sign up for a class. You could buy a textbook. Or, you could crack open a beverage of your choice and re-watch the Bruins 2011 Stanley Cup run.
It’s an easy choice to make, really, as Bruins fans are currently learning all they need to know about “momentum”.
You see, when the Bruins (mass) start moving (velocity), momentum is created, but it’s the rate in which the B’s move that determines the amount of momentum. Before Monday night, the Bruins last first-round series win came against the Montreal Canadiens in 2011 after being down 2-0 in the series on the road. They won four of the next five, knocked off Montreal and eventually hoisted the Cup.
This time around, they improbably came back from a 4-1 deficit in the third period of Game 7 – after holding a 3-1 series lead – to beat the Maple Leafs.
Is the Bruins’ “Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde” type of play a thing of the past? Can they turn an improbable – impossible! – comeback into real momentum heading into the second round, and possibly beyond?
“Well, that’s the one thing that I’m hoping, that we can grab that momentum that we had at the end and carry it into the next series,” Claude Julien told reporters after Monday’s win. “We know we have to be better, we can’t keep playing well in spurts and not so well in other spurts. There’s got to be some consistency. In the year we won, we had a 60-minute effort. That was our goal.”
The Bruins didn’t get out of the first round last season, as they were upset by the Washington Capitals in seven games.
“We always talk about it. The first round is the hardest one to get through,” Milan Lucic told reporters. “You just want to build off it. It’s just one round and you got to look forward to the next step here.”
The next step is the Rangers, a 6-seed that knocked off the third-seeded Capitals Monday night. They too are a team filled with mass and moving at a high velocity. The two will crash head on Thursday night in Boston, and that’s when we’ll truly see the effect of momentum.
“I think we need to keep stepping it up and hopefully push for another good run here, because the Rangers are going to be just as hard or even better,” Lucic said.
