TORONTO – It certainly didn’t look good for the Bruins in a pivotal Game 4 when it was announced during warm-ups that Patrice Bergeron would miss the game with an upper body injury.
But the Bruins managed to grind through some of the more difficult points of the game while keeping it a low-scoring affair, and then gashed the Leafs defense in the final 25 minutes of the game for a 3-1 win at Air Canada Centre.
The Bruins scored on the very first shift of the game with Torey Krug launching a long bomb shot from beyond the right face-off circle that managed to sneak by Frederik Andersen. That was the first in another long line of soft goals that have been surrendered by the Leafs netminder during the playoff series. Toronto took control for the rest of the first period while out-shooting the Bruins by a 12-7 margin and tied things up about seven minutes later on another effective shift from the newly configured Leafs second line.
Mitch Marner stripped a puck from Riley Nash by the side boards, and threw a cross-ice feed from his knees to Tomas Plekanec for the one-timer from the inside of the right circle. The score stayed that way for a long time thanks to some outstanding goaltending from Tuukka Rask, who stopped Leafs breakaway chances in both the first and second period while stopping 21 of the 22 shots that he faced.
It didn’t look particularly good for the Bruins when an icing was called toward the end of the second period at the end of a long shift for Boston’s top line, but they somehow turned it into offense. Nash won the D-zone draw to Adam McQuaid, who threw the puck up the boards to David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand breaking out for a 2-on-1 chance.
Pastrnak threw a slick, no-look pass to Marchand after drawing the defense to him, and Marchand buried his second goal of the playoffs for the go-ahead strike. The Bruins were at it again in the third period with David Krejci feeding Jake DeBrusk in another 2-on-1 for his second goal of the postseason as well.
Boston Bruins
At that point, the Bruins had their insurance goal and hunkered down to take the win and head back to Boston up 3-1 in the best-of-seven series with the hopes that Bergeron will return healthy for Game 5 on Saturday night.
