Boston Bruins: Goaltender Tim Thomas Continues to Exceed Expectations

When will everyone learn when it comes to Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas, if one does not expect the unexpected out of him, then one should at least take the unexpected into consideration.

While teammate Andrew Ference snapped rival Carey Price’s shutout streak at 138 minutes, 11 seconds, Thomas composed his second straight whitewash with a 33-save performance en route to preserving Monday night’s 1-0 victory over the host Montreal Canadiens.

With that, he has now gone 133 minutes and four seconds of his own without authorizing a single opposing goal.

Logically, none of this ought not to have happened. Not after Thomas was allotted only a three-month vacation on the heels of posting a 16-9 record in a cumulative 1,541 minutes and 53 seconds of playoff crease time. Not after that respite was interspersed with celebratory trips to the NHL Awards, the ESPY Awards, his hometown in Michigan and his alma mater in Vermont.

After all of that, Thomas could have and should have been forgiven if he were several strides short of appearing in more than two-thirds of the Bruins first 20 games of the new season. He could not have been expected to post a 9-4-0 record with no more than three opposing strikes on any individual night and no multi-goal margins of defeat not inflated by empty-netters.

And certainly, not even a younger and fresher-legged Tuukka Rask could be ordered to repel all 33 shots faced in a goaltender’s arm-wrestling match at the Bell Centre. Never mind when 15 of those shots come in the closing frame and when 10 of them come on Montreal power plays.

Yet that is exactly what the 37-year-old Thomas has done of late. In the process, he has now claimed six straight decisions as part of the Bruins’ month-old nine-game winning streak.

Ference’s icebreaker and eventual game-clincher was only the third registered stab Boston had issued on Price’s property through 15-plus minutes of action. By that point, Thomas had already repelled eight tries by the Canadiens, though that stat was eclipsed by both Ference’s goal and the fact that Montreal had served the game’s only penalty, a roughing minor on PK Subban.

Regardless, Thomas’ role in the tone the Bruins set was not to be overlooked. He and the majority of his skating mates have repeatedly relearned the lesson against shedding first blood in the Montreal mansion, especially in the opening frame.

But it wasn’t until none other than Hab-turned-Bruin Benoit Pouliot, paying his first regular-season business trip to his former workplace, began to push Boston’s luck that Thomas really flaunted his heroics.

And for someone whose frenetic style is often dissected in stark contrast to Rask’s rigid posture, Thomas demonstrated an undeniable element of poise. The NHL’s official play-by-play account of the game tells the story well enough with the repeated instances of a Thomas save being followed by a “goalie stopped” (as in stoppage of play) entry.

Garnering their first power play with 6:03 to spare in the second, the Habs tested Thomas three times. He promptly summoned a whistle upon denying the first try, a close-range wrister by Brian Gionta. The other two Montreal shots in that segment failed to generate a rebound opportunity and they sandwiched a shorthanded bid by Chris Kelly.

Less than three minutes after his jailbreak, Pouliot belted Subban with a high-stick and slapped his own team with a double-whammy of a double-minor, one that carried over to a fresh sheet in the closing frame.

Still safeguarding the 1-0 lead and with another 2:47 worth of penalty-killing time to start that third period, Thomas held fort again. He drew two more whistles on power-play shots by Tomas Plekanec and Mike Cammalleri and answered two other wagers by Subban and Scott Gomez.

Thomas would deal with 11 more attempts to delete the brittle 1-0 deficit. He would answer them all and get an immediate whistle on six of those saves, including one against Erik Cole after a Zdeno Chara turnover on the cusp of the final minute.

That would be Thomas’ penultimate test of the night amidst Boston’s effort to kill a cross-checking minor to Rich Peverley at the 18:21 mark.

Thomas caught a more incidental break when he blocked another Gionta shot one second before Montreal was ruled offside at 19:48. But by then, the march to triumph was already hard-earned enough.

At this pace, Thomas technically projects to start up to 52 or 53 games this regular season, winning as many as 36.

The chances of him meeting that projection are sketchy, especially with Rask’s transcript improving much like the rest of the team’s.

For at least the immediate future, the odds are that Rask will get the nod for Wednesday’s excursion to Buffalo with head coach Claude Julien saving Thomas for Friday’s confrontation with the Detroit Red Wings. Rask will likely rotate back in to face the Winnipeg Jets the following night.

Whether or not that amounts to more of an even Thomas-Rask pattern down the road remains to be seen. But for Thomas, with all he has sitting in his back seat, the mere act of setting his aforementioned trajectory path this deep into the season is a head-turner of its own.

What should one expect? That’s been his specialty for a while.