There was a little bit of Bruins talk during Don Cherry’s Coach’s Corner segment on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada last weekend, and it centered on Phil Kessel and Marc Savard. Grapes talked a bit about the growing groundswell of pressure loading up on the 21-year-old Kessel with the Toronto Maple Leafs struggling badly out of the gate. With each loss the 2010 first-round pick traded to the B’s for Kessel gets higher in value, and the expectations increase on a young player coming back from shoulder surgery with a mid-November return date.

Cherry also tossed a few attaboys at Savard while decrying his Olympic snub by Team Canada, and painted some other invitees are skating around “with minus-15′s” already this season. Good stuff as always from Dandy Don. Here’s the video courtesy of youtube with the Bruins-related stuff coming up around the 3:15 mark.

There is a formula for success that works for just about every facet of life you can imagine: K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple, stupid.

This principle is especially pertinent in hockey. If players start pushing too hard, gripping their sticks and getting cute with the offense then there is a good probability that their team will not score. That was essentially the problem with the Bruins for the first 52 minutes in tonight’s 4-3 come-from-behind shoot-out victory over the New York Islanders.

The Bruins ended up with a respectable 30 shots but it took a flurry at the end to get to that point. As of 9:50 in the third period the Bruins had 17 shots with only three in the period. Not a good combination for a team looking to overcome a 3-0 deficit. Until that point the Bruins were flat, had problems controlling the puck and thus sustaining momentum against one of the lesser-skilled teams in the NHL. Read the rest of this entry »

WILMINGTON — As expected, Claude Julien is putting his players through the paces in a skate very long on full-out skating and battling for loose pucks. Plenty of bodies crashing against the boards and red-faced players huffing and puffing to keep up with the action.

First was a round of full-paced breakout drills, then 2-on-2 battle drills and now it’s rugged, hard-nosed one-on-one battle drills in front of the net. These exercises are eons more competitive than the laissez-faire defense flashed against the Ducks on Thursday night.

At one point, Patrice Bergeron was on one knee catching his wind while resting up for another round of sprinting up and down the ice and battling for the puck. Players are definitely feeling this one a bit.

Julien said last night that it was up to him to clean up the dirty laundry “in that dressing room” and he’s gone about picking up the strewn-about clothes on the ice at the morning practice. No changes to any of the lines, but it’s expected that Johnny Boychuk and Tuukka Rask may get some ice time Saturday night against the New York Islanders.

Following practice, the B’s coach used buzz words like “lazy” and “commitment” and said he was hoping to get the attention of his players with such a punitive practice. It sounds as if reviews of the game film were more like a slasher film than aesthetically-pleasing hockey, with broken ankles and butchered forechecking assignments strewn all about the ice. Culprit No. 1 was the Corey Perry second-period score when he moved freely into the zone and breezed past Mark Stuart and Matt Hunwick before dumping the puck into a vacated net.

But Julien said there was much more to dislike about Thursday night’s defeat — the worst home loss at the TD Garden for the B’s since an 8-2 savaging at the hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs back on March 2, 2008.

“We need to grab their attention right now. We’re looking for commitment. We’re looking for effort, attitude,” said Julien. “I think all of those things put together is what we need to have, to be the team that we should be.”

Practice ended with the players doing full-out skating sprints the entire length of the ice in a criss cross fashion. First rushing end-to-end in what some hockey coaches affectionately refer to as “Herbies” (after US Olympic coach Herb Brooks) and then rotating to side-to-side sprints tapping each end as they go. That lasted for a good 10 minutes and the players were appropriately gassed afterward.

“It’s a bit of a message, but in the same sense we don’t want to end up doing that all year,” said B’s center Marc Savard. “We just have to stay focused, and that was a bit of it here today. We needed to stay ‘going hard’ all practice just like we should be going hard all game.”

–Julien said that starting Tuukka Rask Saturday night against the Islanders was a “possibility” with Thomas struggling behind a leaky defense, but there weren’t any impending line changes or callups from Providence on the horizon. Thomas is 1-2 with a 4.00 goals against average an .868 save percentage along with several “soft-ish” goals among those allowed, but the 35-year-old veteran was also winless in his first four starts last season.

“There’s always a possibility [of starting Rask],” said Julien. “But those kinds of things are always taken care of on a daily basis. We’re a day-to-day hockey club, and I don’t predict things down the road. But, yeah, for no other reason than down the road we’re going to need him.

“Last year he came up and played well. The year before, even with the lack of experience he had, he still showed us some good things. I’m confident in him. I think he’s grown so much that if he needs to go in and play — I can’t see any reason why the coaching staff or the players themselves wouldn’t have confidence in Tuukka.”

Morris has added plenty to Boston's power play since escaping from the mess in the desert

WILMINGTON — It wasn’t a common sight last season, but there was at least one Bruins practice that involved the Boston defensemen corps firing pucks through bright orange traffic cones.

The traffic cones were placed near the right and left point areas in the attack zone, and the drill was designed to achieve pinpoint accuracy on the all-important power play blasts. The big gun shots from the B’s defensemen are oft-times the trigger to jolting Boston’s man advantage attack. With that in mind, there were times when a normally mighty power play lost some of it’s bite for the B’s last season when those point shots were nudged a little too far off the mark.

It wasn’t the sheer power of the long-range bids because guys like Zdeno Chara and Dennis Wideman have slappers capable of obliterating glass behind the net — with the assistance of some good wood, of course. But there were times when the shot would fade wide to either side, or an aggressive penalty kill would smother a shot with one brave sacrificial body.

“That’s the one thing that we lacked last year. At times we really had some trouble getting our shots through,” said B’s coach Claude Julien. “Teams are blocking shots and getting into the shooting lanes, and its getting harder to get shots off.”

Despite the intermittent bouts of wildness with their point shots, the Bruins still boasted a 23.6 percent power play success rate, and ranked fourth in the entire NHL. Only the high-powered units in Detroit, Washington and San Jose ranked higher last season.

Read the rest of this entry »

WILMINGTON — Milan Lucic is skating free and easy without any trace of a limp on the top line along with Marc Savard and Marco Sturm in Tuesday morning’s Bruins practice at Ristuccia Arena. Big Looch missed Monday’s session with a non-hockey related issue that was essentially a tiny facial abrasion that got slightly infected, and was addressed medically Monday. The original bump on his kisser wasn’t sustained playing hockey, and Lucic is back on the ice Tuesday morning.

 The “personal day” for Lucic had nothing to do with his legs or his right punching hand. Both were thrown out as speculation after Lucic abused Jay Harrison in a bloody brawl Saturday night during their win over the Carolina Hurricanes. But neither theory was the actual case with Lucic, who appears good to go against the Anaheim Ducks Thursday night.

–The Boston Bruins/Carolina Hurricanes fight-filled Saturday night opener for NESN earned a 3.9 household rating, which marks the network’s highest rated season-opening broadcast in 25 years of covering the Bruins. NESN’s 3.9 rating was also the highest average household rating recorded in the Boston DMA (designated market area) during the game’s 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm window, beating all other broadcasts and cable networks during that time period.

The network’s previous high rating for a season opening broadcast came during a Bruins 2-1 win over the New York Rangers on January 23, 1995 when the network earned a 3.8 rating for its first broadcast coming out of a lockout shortened season.

After laying an egg in their season opener against Washington, the Bruins knew they had to pick up the effort level on Saturday against Aaron Ward, Andrew Alberts and the Carolina Hurricanes, the same team that eliminated last spring in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.

And there would be no slow start to this one, like on Thursday night when the Bruins fell down early and never really recovered.

The Bruins scored on four of their eight power play chances and routed Carolina, 7-2, before a pumped-up TD Garden crowd that was treated to nearly as many good brawls as goals. Milan Lucic and Shawn Thornton added to the festivities with their bouts against the Canes.

Here’s what the combatants had to say, or at least some of the key players and coaches.

Head coach Claude Julien said the effort was there on Saturday night.

Julien said his team knew they had to pick up the energy level from Thursday.

Marc Savard said the Bruins had to keep things simple to get back on track.

Steve Begin said the Bruins found their groove on Saturday.

Carolina defenseman Andrew Alberts said the Canes knew the Bruins would come out angry.