BOSTON – The Bruins wanted to get their confidence and their winning mentality back ahead of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and they did exactly that against an Ottawa Senators bunch just playing out the string.
The Bruins scored four goals in the final 40 minutes of the game and took a 5-2 win over the Ottawa Senators at TD Garden to snap a three-game losing streak. With Tampa losing in overtime against Carolina, any win of any kind on Sunday night against the Florida Panthers will give the Black and Gold the Atlantic Division title and the top seed in the Eastern Conference.
Ottawa actually scored the first goal of the game on a Ryan Dzingel strike after a Charlie McAvoy turnover near the B’s blue line, and Boston really didn’t look all that strong in the opening 20 minutes.
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But after that it was all Black and Gold with David Pastrnak tying things up with a power play strike early in the second period, and then Tommy Wingels and Danton Heinen adding scores in the middle 20 minutes that gave the Bruins a comfortable lead. Ryan Dzingel scored another goal in the third period to get the Senators back closer to the Bruins, but fourth line winger Noel Acciari iced it with his 10th goal of the season on a breakaway late in the third period.
David Backes added an empty net goal to make the score seem a lot more disparate than it actually was, but the Bruins followed up a so-so first period with something much closer to their norm in the final 40 minutes of play. Anton Khudobin also stopped 26 of the 28 shots that he faced in earning 16th win of the season while playing some pretty good hockey between the pipes aside from the two times that Dzingel managed to beat him.
