Boston Bruins: Victory in St. Louis Should Be a Timely Confidence Booster

The Boston Bruins were desperate to avert their first three-game pointless streak since October. They were visiting a St. Louis Blues team that rivals Detroit in the push for the NHL’s best home record.

With the Blues, the Bruins were also confronting the team that supplanted them for the league’s defensive throne which Boston itself had inevitably abdicated. And they were doing it sans two of their top 12 forwards in Nathan Horton and Rich Peverley.

In the wake of Wednesday night’s 4-2 victory, there is less reason than ever to wait for them to regress once again. As much as any kind of losing effort against an ostensibly inferior opponent can puncture one’s confidence, an assertive triumph over a fellow contender is one of the best possible sources of redress.

The Blues, who have gone 30-10-7 since replacing head coach Davis Payne with Ken Hitchcock, are engaged in the Western Conference’s toughest divisional footrace, chasing Detroit and trying to ward off Nashville and Chicago. Home ice for the first round of the postseason and beyond hinges on every point for them.

In addition, St. Louis entered Wednesday night’s action with a 26-3-4 transcript at the Scottrade Center, translating to a .848 winning percentage on home ice. Just another reason why they would surely prefer to stay within the top four, if not ascend to the top two or three on the Western Conference leaderboard.

The Bruins matched, or exceeded, St. Louis’ urgency in the tone-setting stages of Wednesday’s bout. Chris Kelly pelted Vezina Trophy candidate Brian Elliott with the game’s first two shots on goal before the first 40 seconds had melted off the clock.

The shot count was 2-1 and the hit count was 1-0 when Daniel Paille bumped Alex Pietrangelo at the 1:29 mark. And upon forcing Boston’s second unanswered takeaway, Brad Marchand tuned the mesh to draw first blood with a mere 2:29 gone.

Marchand, who also cemented the 4-2 upshot with an insurance strike at 9:14 of the third, joined two fellow forwards in the evening’s two-point club. Kelly ended a 13-game goal drought and returned to autumn form with his first multipoint effort since Nov. 26 and his seventh of the season.

With his own goal-assist combo, Milan Lucic improved his plus/minus rating for the first time since the team’s last regulation win on Feb. 5. In the interim, he had lost four consecutive points in that department.

Lucic’s goal was an assist in its own right. It helped to reward Joe Corvo, formally credited with the primary assist, for discharging a quality point shot, something head coach Claude Julien should still be asking more of from his lone offseason blue line additive.

Beyond the production department, team captain Zdeno Chara personified the team’s replenished outlook as dramatically as he had represented its disfigurement in the better part of the preceding 2-4-0 lull.

Dating back to the Bruins’ 4-1 win at Washington Feb. 5, Chara saw his plus/minus rating plummet by nine points while recording a mere seven hits and committing 10 giveaways in six games.

In St. Louis, the towering defender was on the ice for three Boston strikes and neither of the Blues goals. And he threw five body-checks for the first time in 10 outings this month after landing no more than two in any of his previous eight games.

Backing the improved defense, Tim Thomas did momentarily allow an initial 2-0 advantage to evaporate, evoking short-term memories of recent seesaw shootout victories over Montreal and Nashville that ought to have been polished off within the conventional 60-minute time frame.

But Kelly restored the lead to 3-2 in the final minute of the opening frame before the reigning Vezina recipient repelled 22 consecutive stabs for 40 minutes of shutout hockey.

In the other crease, while the Bruins were confined to a slim 19 shots on goal, they tagged Elliott with a season-worst, single-night four goals against and forced him to a .789 save percentage. This is the same Elliott who still leads the NHL with a 1.65 goals-against average on the year and trails only Henrik Lundqvist in the way of save percentage.

And his off-night happened to come against a team that, not long ago, could not be caught at the top of the league’s offensive leaderboard.

Is normalcy restored on Julien’s bench? If it proves not to be by Friday’s visit to Buffalo the same way it was the last time the Bruins ventured into First Niagara Center, three nights after the Washington game, it will be immensely tougher to explain this time.