BOSTON – One couldn’t be blamed if they watched the emotional Bruins win over the Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday night and mistook Tuukka Rask for vintage Tim Thomas.
After all, it was Rask who that strong-armed the Bolts once again by stopping 26 of 28 shots in a 4-2 victory and it was Boston’s No. 1 goalie who was at his best in the second and third periods when he made 20 saves with his team holding a one-goal lead. Rask’s moving pad save on Nikita Kucherov in the third period was actually the key play at the key moment that directly led to Patrice Bergeron scoring in 4-on-4 play and giving Boston some breathing room when they really needed it.
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For those reasons alone, it was a strong night for the Finnish netminder, who seemed to have found his playoff level on Boston's recent road trip.
But the thing everybody is going to be talking about is the dust-up with Corey Conacher in the second period around the Boston net where Rask started throwing punches at him a la Tim Thomas slamming the Sedins during the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals.
Conacher and Brandon Carlo were the initial players battling around the net as they crashed into a fiery Rask in the crease. That’s when the Bruins goaltender lost it as Conacher lingered in the crease just a little too long. Rask gave Conacher a shot to the back of the head and then a couple more for good measure and then a team-wide melee began with Carlo getting in the middle of it with a group of Lightning players.
Needless to say, it fired up the entire Bruins bench in the biggest game of the season.
“It’s great,” said Brad Marchand. “It shows that he’s engaged and he’s in the game. He’s emotional and that’s when a lot of guys play their best when they’re emotional like that. He’s stepping up for his teammates and reacting the way he does. You know, he had a great game so it’s good to see.”
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It was completely unexpected out of the normally placid, even-keeled Rask, but it also showed a focused, intense approach that sounds exactly like what the B's are looking for from their No. 1 goaltender with the playoffs just around the corner. When the performance and the emotional engagement are both at a high level, it certainly looks as if Rask is in playoff form with six games remaining in the regular season.
“It was an emotional game and I got into it, so...Two good hockey teams battling for points and, yeah it was [like] a playoff game, it was fun,” said Rask. “In the first period someone fell on my knee there, there was no penalty called – there was a penalty called actually – and that one it felt like to me that I don’t think our own D’s were jumping on me, I felt like they were [being pushed] or something so I just had to let them know I was there because it happened twice. So I jumped in there and threw a couple punches and that was it.”
Rask got a double-minor for roughing out of the exchange while the Bruins ended up with a power play. He joked afterward about how long it had been since that had happened to him in a hockey game. For the Bruins, it was much less about the minor penalties accrued and much more about the feeling that Rask was just as passionately into it as the rest of his teammates on the bench.
“Well, I do. I do,” said Bruce Cassidy, when asked if he liked seeing that level of emotional engagement out of his goalie. “It’s not something you want every night because I don’t – it doesn’t happen every night, for obvious reasons. But yeah, you want to see some fire, some urgency. He’s defending his territory without being reckless, I didn’t think. He just did what he had to do in that situation, calmed down and played [afterward].”
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In a number of encouraging signs on Thursday night that the Bruins are primed and ready for the postseason, none was bigger or better than Rask getting in touch with his bad self against Boston’s biggest division rivals.