It's once again coming down to the wire for the Bruins.
Fortunately for the Bruins, who punched their ticket to the postseason back on Mar. 21, this Game 82 is not anything close to the situation they found themselves in frustrating final day did-not-qualify ends in 2015 and 2016. Nor do they need any sort of outside help to get where they'd like to be for the start of the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
This mad dash to the finish instead comes with their sights set on the East's No. 1 seed.
It even comes with a simple breakdown.
A win of any sort against the Panthers in tonight's Jan. 11 makeup game at TD Garden and the Bruins capture the top seed in the Eastern Conference. A loss and they finish in second place behind the Lightning. A win locks the Bruins into a first-round showdown with the Devils and a loss means they'll instead play the Maple Leafs in round one.
The Bruins swept their season series against the Devils this year, which included swiping two road victories at Newark's Prudential Center, though the games were much tighter than a sweep would indicate. In fact, you could very well make the case that all three games would have been losses had it not been for some stellar play from both Tuukka Rask and Anton Khudobin (they stopped a combined 112-of-119 shots against in that three-game sample, good for a .941 save percentage in the season series).
It doesn't get any easier with a loss, though, Boston has noticeably struggled against the Maple Leafs in the Auston Matthews Era with just one win in their last eight cracks. The Bruins played the Leafs considerably better this season, though, finishing with a 1-2-1 mark in the season series, and did so while never really appearing to have their full assortment of weapons at their disposal. Another bonus: Patrice Bergeron made Matthews completely disappear in the second-year standout's only game against the Bruins this year.
But the Bruins are refusing to focus on potential showdowns just yet.
"We don't care, we focus on ourselves," Bruins winger David Pastrnak said of the when asked about the potential opponents and if there's a preference for the B's. "We've played both of those teams all season long so for us if we want to win, we need to go through everybody and for us we want to play our best and focus on ourselves."
"However it turns out, there's no easy team in the NHL playoffs, I don't believe. Nashville proved that last year; Ottawa proved that [last year]. I mean, everybody that gets in is a good hockey club," Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy said. "So, it's not about who you play, it's just about the honor of being Eastern Conference champions and Atlantic Division champions and having that number one seed.
"I think it gives you some confidence."
The Bruins have finished as the conference's top seed twice in the last decade (2009 and 2014) and wound up losing in seven games in the second round both times.
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