This great Bruce Cassidy quote perfectly explains Bruins’ road mentality

The Boston Bruins are 4-2 on the road in the 2019 Stanley Cup playoffs after a 3-0 victory against the Columbus Blue Jackets in Game 6 of their second-round series.

The win sends the Bruins to the Eastern Conference final, where they will take on the Carolina Hurricanes for the opportunity to play for the Stanley Cup.

The Bruins were a decent road team in the regular season with a 20-15-6 record, but in the playoffs, Boston has improved its performance away from TD Garden. The B's have won three of their last four postseason road games, and overall they have a plus-8 goal differential on opposing ice.

B's head coach Bruce Cassidy was asked after Monday night's win about the importance of clinching the series before Game 7, and the bench boss explained the team's mentality, particularly on the road. Most teams just try to withstand the energy of the home team and its crowd early in road games, but the Bruins have taken the opposite approach, and it's certainly paid huge dividends so far.

"We needed to win the first 10 minutes," Cassidy told reporters. "I hear people saying they come into another team's building and 'We've got to weather the storm.' Well, we want to create the storm. We're not interested in weathering any storm. We want to go out and let them know we're here to play, be aggressive and assertive. I thought we did a pretty good job of that."

Putting Tuukka Rask's series-clinching shutout in historical context

That is the perfect mentality for any team going on the road in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Setting the tone (either with physicality and/or the pace of play), scoring the first goal and taking the crowd out of the game is essential to winning away from home in the postseason, and the Bruins have done a tremendous job of that through two rounds.