Tuukka Rask, Boston Bruins Can Thoroughly Trust Each Other Now

Facing the likes of Jose Theodore, who had not lost to Boston in regulation since Tuukka Rask was a 17-year-old, the Bruins could have been forgiven for limiting their offerings to the 24-year-old stopper Friday night.

After all, while there has been a recent history of making Rask’s life a little tougher than colleague Tim Thomas’, another loss by a soccer score to Theodore would have been enough to mask that myth.

Instead, in their last business engagement before Christmas, the Bruins promptly turned Theodore’s cage into Rask’s own Salvation Army kettle. And they imposed a most involuntary Ebenezer Scrooge-esque reversal on Theodore, who gave way to Scott Clemmensen after a four-goal first period en route to an 8-0 Boston victory at TD Garden.

The win constituted Rask’s single-largest helping of offensive support in his NHL career. Just as significantly, he defied any hint of frostbite that might have come after 10 nights without any game action.

By the time the Bruins adjourned to the dressing room for the second intermission, their lead now extended to 6-0, Rask already had set a new career high with a shutout streak spanning 126:47 of clock time. That began with his relief appearance in Columbus Dec. 10, when he salvaged a 5-3 victory in what was essentially a 2-0 mini-game victory in the third period.

It continued three nights later with a 3-0 blanking of Los Angeles, and again through Friday night’s romp, amounting to his first official set of back-to-back shutouts as an NHL stopper. And he has now gone 146 minutes and 47 seconds without yielding a goal while his team has tuned the opposing mesh 13 unanswered times.

Rask has allowed two goals or fewer in each of his last seven appearances, receiving 21 goals from his skating mates in the process. Conversely, in his first five starts this season, he had allowed three or more on three occasions and lost his first three decisions by a cumulative 8-2 score.

Since November, Rask is 7-1-1, owing heavily to the 33 goals the Bruins have tallied in those eight games and one decisive period.

But to be sure, Rask’s role in amplifying his record and stats is not to be overlooked. His last time out before Friday, he turned away a season-high 41 shots against the Kings en route to his first full-length shutout of the season.

Ironically, that was his heaviest bushel of saves since he blanked the Panthers on Nov. 18 of last year, repelling an identical 41 biscuits. And only once in his NHL career, either in the regular season or postseason, has Rask ever worked up a bigger sweat, that being when he stopped 43 out of 45 stabs by the Buffalo Sabres on Feb. 9, 2010.

As it happens, while Theodore’s status as Boston’s nemesis has met its first hiccup in recent memory, Rask may have a favorable portfolio working against the Panthers’ laundry. Friday was the first time he had faced Florida since the aforementioned 4-0 victory 13 months ago. In his career, he is 3-1-0 against the Panthers with a cumulative three goals-against on his tab.

From a goalie-team relationship standpoint, Friday’s stat sheet offered even more stimulating signs for Bruins’ buffs than just the ragdoll treatment of Theodore and Clemmensen.

It certainly didn’t hurt that when Panther-turned-Bruin Gregory Campbell took the game’s first penalty, Brad Marchand opened the night’s scoring with a shorthanded goal, the only shot on net at either end during the Florida power play. But Friday was also a bona fide team victory on the defensive front.

Although the Panthers were playing back-to-back games coming straight from Ottawa and missing such key scorers as Stephen Weiss, it was still on Boston to crack the Theodore code and trip up the surprise Southeast Division leaders.

By night’s end, Florida’s prolific point patroller Brian Campbell had failed to land a shot on net, having two attempts blocked and watching a third go wide.

Fellow puckslinging defenseman Jason Garrison, who is third among all Panthers with 86 shots on net this year, was only allowed to test Rask once. Ditto top gun Kris Versteeg.

As a whole, however, a total of 15 individual Panthers pelted Rask with 30 pucks, including three via Tomas Fleischmann and a respectably productive Shawn Matthias. And the shot total exponentially snowballed by the period with six in the first, 12 in the middle frame and 13 in the closing stanza.

Not exactly a gift-wrapped goose-egg, but not a night where the Boston skaters left it all in the stopper’s hands. That description naturally applied to the win as well.

With a full 11 games-played and 12 decisions on the year, Rask has now whittled down his goals-against average this season to 1.66, 16 points lower than that of Thomas. He is also an ice chip ahead of Thomas with a .944 save percentage.

Why, again, was anybody calling to trade this guy? Theodore may have loosened his tight fist (for at least one night), but the Bruins would be well-advised to greedily hold on to their tandem of celestial stoppers.