Joe Sacco had a unique perspective to offer before Sunday’s Bruins Centennial Game against the Montreal Canadiens, a game played 100 years to the day of Boston’s first-ever NHL game, and a game the Bruins would ultimately win 6-3.
Sacco is, of course, the franchise’s current head coach, a job he has held on an interim basis for less than two weeks. That Joe Sacco had to worry about getting the Bruins ready to bounce back after a rough loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday.
But long before Sacco got that job, and long before he became a Boston assistant coach back in 2014, Sacco was a die-hard Bruins fan as a kid growing up in Medford. That Joe Sacco took a moment to appreciate the history that would be on the ice before the game and reflected on what made him fall in love with those Bruins teams he watched in the late 1970s and 1980s.
“I just always liked the way the Bruins played as a kid. They played with passion. They played with emotion,” Sacco said. “I’ve had such a large gap of teams that I’ve watched over the years growing up here, but they always matched the city with their work ethic. They had characters in the room, and it just seemed to blend in great with the city.”
Passion. Emotion. Match the city’s work ethic. It’s a sentiment that has been echoed by Bruins legends throughout this past year of centennial celebrations, including by one of those legends Sacco watched as a kid.
“The Boston Bruins are like the city,” Wayne Cashman told NESN during the first intermission Sunday. “You go out in this town and walk down the street and you can pick up 20 guys and say, ‘That’s a Boston Bruin. Look at that guy.’ He’s got a hard hat on, he’s going to work, he’s gonna go home and have a couple of beers. That’s the way we were. We took what the city showed us, and we loved it. And then the city took us, and we had a great time.”
That is the baseline that is expected of any Bruins team: Passion, emotion and hard work. Even in years when the Bruins are not the most talented team, and when a Stanley Cup might seem like a pipe dream, those three characteristics are the expectation.
For fans, it is a demand. When they see a Bruins team lacking those elements, they let them know, something current captain Brad Marchand has seen – and come to appreciate – throughout his 16 seasons in Boston.
“The fans are very passionate here with every sports team,” Marchand said Saturday. “They let you know when things are not where they expect it to be. They’re very hard on teams, but they’re very, very passionate, and they support us all the way through. … It’s not like that everywhere. You go to these other cities, you’re in the rinks, and they don’t have the same passion that our fans do. It’s such a big reason why the team cares about putting a competitive team on the ice every night, and why we care to show up, is they deserve it and they expect it.”
This year’s Bruins have too often not held up their end of the bargain, and they have heard about it from the TD Garden crowd more than once. It is part of what has made this sluggish first 26 games so frustrating and confounding.
It is possible, even probable, that this Bruins team simply does not have enough offensive firepower to be a true Cup contender. But it should still be good enough to win more than it loses as long as the roster they do have turns in the requisite effort every night. It should not be in 10th place in the Eastern Conference, outside the playoffs all together, which is where it was entering Sunday. It should not have turned in a flat, one-goal performance against Pittsburgh’s NHL-worst defense on Friday.
Whether it was the reminder offered by Sunday’s pregame celebration, which every current Bruin watched from ice level, or simply the realization within the room that turning in another performance like Friday’s was unacceptable, these Bruins put forth the kind of effort on Sunday that the fans and dozens of Bruins alumni in the building could be proud of.
They stormed out to a 3-0 lead midway through the first period with three goals just 1:10 apart, stunning the Habs and energizing the Garden. Charlie McAvoy opened up the scoring with his first of two goals, attacking downhill from the point before wrapping behind the net and beating Montreal goalie Cayden Primeau to the far post.
Then the other assistant captain stepped up, as David Pastrnak forced a turnover in the offensive zone and set up Pavel Zacha for a great chance. Primeau denied that bid, but Zacha tracked down the rebound and fed it right back to Pastrnak, who buried his first goal in eight games.
Just 15 seconds after that, Mark Kastelic went in hard on the forecheck and forced another turnover deep in the Montreal zone, winning the puck and firing a shot on net that produced a rebound for Charlie Coyle to flip in.
Kastelic helped set the tone physically all night, as he often does, landing a game-high five hits and going toe-to-toe with tough guy Arber Xhekaj in a scrum in the second period, which likely would have evolved into a full-fledged fight had a linesman not intervened before it could get started. McAvoy did his part in the physicality department as well, as did Trent Frederic (4 hits), Morgan Geekie (3) and several others. Elias Lindholm won battle after battle all over the ice, singlehandedly killing several Montreal possessions in the Boston end.
“It’s funny when you that highlight reel, just different generations of Bruins, and they always played a hard game,” McAvoy said after the game. “I thought we played good tonight. I thought we were physical, but we also played with a lot of skill as well.”
McAvoy extended the lead to 4-0 on a shorthanded breakaway 38 seconds into the second period. After the Canadiens cut it to 4-1, Coyle added his second of the game just 21 seconds into the third, capitalizing on a Cole Koepke steal in the neutral zone.
The Bruins let up a little too much after that, allowing Montreal to cut the lead to 5-3 before finally stepping on the gas again and closing out the game with an empty-netter from Koepke. Jeremy Swayman gave up at least one goal he should have stopped, the latest indication that there’s still work for him to do to get his game to where it needs to be.
Overall, though, this was the kind of game the Bruins needed to play. They needed the passion and emotion. They needed to bounce back from Friday’s dud, and they needed to make the legends in the building proud. There was perhaps no better synergy of it all than McAvoy’s shorthanded goal and kiss-the-crest celebration, all while Ray Bourque sang his praises as a guest in the NESN broadcast booth.
“Shouldn't need a reminder,” McAvoy said after the game, “but sometimes you do, how special it is to be a Bruin and how much pride you should have in wearing the same jersey those guys wore. So, we tried to emphasize that tonight, and it was really fortunate that we won in front of those guys.”