Boston Bruins Tie It Up: Tim Thomas and Rookie Tyler Seguin Shine in Game 2

You forget sometimes, as rink-side fans pound on the glass in support of some boxing match that’s broken out in front of them, that hockey is about two things: skating and scoring.

Somewhere in the midst of your focus on the game, you lose sight of the fact that with all of the positioning, line changes and passes that go on, it is still about that little puck getting slipped past a goaltender by a guy on skates.

Just ask the Bruins’ goaltender, Tim Thomas.

Thirteen seconds into Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Adam Hall tucked a backhander into the net to open the scoring. Then ask Tampa Bay’s goaltender, Dwayne Roloson, who saw five goals slide by him in the second period and found himself sitting on the bench in the third period.

This game started out at high speed and kept getting faster, prompting play-by-play announcer Mike Emrick to comment at one point that it was like watching “one of those tabletop hockey games.”

Skating and scoring, and oh yeah, speed.  

Not to mention a Bruins power play that scored as many goals in this one game as they’d scored in the 11 previous playoff games (41 attempts) versus Montreal and Philadelphia. All of this without the point-leading services of Patrice Bergeron, who sat in a suit in a viewing booth, nursing the effects of a concussion.

What made this game particularly compelling, though, was the combination of Tampa Bay’s furious persistence, which brought them within a single goal in the third period, and some mind-boggling saves by Tim Thomas.

Thomas, in fact, scored Tampa Bay’s fifth goal. A skirmish in front of the net knocked his mask off, and a wild shot from off to his left, bounced off his forehead into the goal.

In every sport, there’s a kind of signature game which you’d like to replay for any of a circle of acquaintances who fail to appreciate a given sport.

Game 2 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Eastern Conference Finals was one of those games: Played clean (no fights), played hard and played at breathtaking speed, it had everything anyone could ever want in a sports competition.

If you happened to be a Boston Bruins fan, this included a critical series-tying victory, the emergence of a rookie (Tyler Seguin), who, in replacing the team’s top playoff point-scorer (Bergeron), scored two goals and assisted on two others.

It also verified the presence of a critical component to any Stanley Cup winning team: a hot goalie.

Tim Thomas recorded his lowest save percentage of the 2011 playoffs in this game (.878), but made the ones he did make—all 36 of them—count. He faced the third highest number of shots that he’d seen since the playoffs began, and particularly in the third period, kept coming up huge from every imaginable (and in some cases, unimaginable) angle. He stopped blasts from the point, ballet-imitation turnarounds, wrist shots, breakaways and up-close-and-personal stuff attempts all night long.

He kept the Lightning at bay, just long enough.

On to Tampa on Thursday.