BOSTON – The Bruins are finding ways to win hockey games these days and they did it again on Saturday afternoon.
Drew Stafford threw a seemingly harmless puck at the net with 5.6 seconds left and a fortuitous bounce off Brandon Manning’s stick ricocheted past Steve Mason to give the Bruins a 2-1 victory over the Flyers.
It gives the Bruins 10 wins in 13 games under Bruce Cassidy and is the seventh in eight tries on home ice since the coaching change. The score also gives new guy Stafford two goals in four games since the B’s sent a conditional sixth-round pick to Winnipeg for him and caps off a day when the winger was dropped to the fourth line in the hard-fought contest.
The Bruins got on the board first with a power-play strike at the end of the first period buoyed by a judgment call from the B’s bench. Cassidy kept the first PP unit out for the duration of the possession and they paid back the trust with a David Pastrnak strike from the slot after a quick centering pass from Patrice Bergeron.
It was Pastrnak’s 28th goal of the season and extended a career-best eight-game point streak for the 20-year-old puck prodigy.
The Flyers punched back at the start of the second period when Jordan Weal pounced on a loose puck in front after Wayne Simmonds won a 1-on-1 battle with a gassed Brandon Carlo at the end of a very long opening shift.
That’s the way it remained until the third period when Stafford played the role of last-second hero. Tuukka Rask stopped 26 of 27 shots while playing brilliantly in a second period dominated by the Broad Street Bullies.
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