Boston Bruins: Claude Julien's Pupils Reiterate Their Familiar Resilience

Boston Bruins fans ought to know this drill by now. In fact, given the team’s motif of resiliency that has defined the Claude Julien era, one could have predicted Thursday’s 6-2 throttling of the Toronto Maple Leafs during Tuesday’s acrid 4-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes and not warranted any ridicule.

How common is this display of bounce-back proficiency? Out of 335 regular-season games behind the Boston bench, Julien has brooked a loss of a three-goal margin or greater 32 times, the latest being Tuesday’s penalty- and ejection-filled debacle.

But in their subsequent effort to redeem themselves the next time out, the Bruins are now 21-8-3 in the Julien era.

In Julien’s first year, beginning with his very first weekend on the job in October 2007, Boston went 8-2-1 when coming off a lopsided loss. The next season, when they finished first in the Eastern Conference, the Bruins faced that situation twice, but went a respectable 1-1-0.

In a more turbulent 2009-10 campaign, they were 7-3-1 after a submissive effort. And last year, they went 4-2-1.

Going into this week, all three of the Bruins’ losses were by a single goal. You could try to stamp an asterisk next to Carolina’s insurance on Tuesday since it came courtesy of two 5-on-3 strikes, but the simple fact is the Bruins brought that all upon themselves. In turn, their followers had the right to express their doubts going forward.

But more often than not, when their seats get hot and the question “Will they respond?” is posed, the Bruins respond. And not surprisingly, many of the seven holdovers from Julien’s first season factored heavily in Thursday’s victory, some of them busting personal slumps.

Before the first period was even over, defenseman Andrew Ference had himself a playmaker hat trick after previously mustering but one assist in the first six games of this season.

By night’s end, he was one of four Boston skaters with a plus-two rating and led the team with four blocked shots.

Fellow blueliner and captain Zdeno Chara entered the game with zero points on the year and a team-leading 25 penalty minutes, that figure instantaneously inflated by his ill-advised infraction against Carolina on Tuesday.

Like Ference, Chara would figure into two first-period power-play goals, assisting on a Nathan Horton equalizer and slugging home the eventual game-winner himself. And like Ference, he finished with a three-point night with an assist on Patrice Bergeron’s insurance strike at 10:08 of the closing frame.

Bergeron was goal-less on the year and pointless since cultivating a pair of assists against Tampa Bay 12 days and five games ago. That was until he tuned the Toronto mesh on his team-leading eighth try of the night.

Milan Lucic matched Chara’s one-goal, two-assist output and also matched the captain’s return to translating his emotions productively. Despite taking no penalties, Lucic received the least ice time of all non-fourth-liners Thursday night with 11:11, nine seconds fewer than Benoit Pouliot. Yet he used that time to concoct three shots and three points.

And David Krejci, coming back from an injury that had sidelined him for nearly 10 full days, won 11 of his 16 faceoffs.

Not to be outdone, many of the relatively newer faces played their conspicuous parts on Thursday.

Tyler Seguin regained and even added an extra layer to his point-per-game pace with a 1-2-3 transcript identical to that of Chara and Lucic for a 2-6-8 log through seven games. Horton doubled his numbers to 2-2-4 and with his own goal-assist value pack, Chris Kelly had his first regular-season multi-point game as a Bruin.

Ironically, the only active player with no absolutely registered contributions―no points, no shots on goal, no attempted shots, no hits, no takeaways, no blocked shots―was Pouliot, one of only two players new to the organization as of this autumn.

But apparently there is plenty of time for him to get with this program of elasticity. The defending champs have not let it get away.