It took until the shootout, but Dallas Stars forwards Tyler Seguin and Rich Peverley finally got a measure of revenge against their old team, the Boston Bruins. Seguin and Peverley, who were traded to Dallas in July in a deal that sent Loui Eriksson to Boston, both scored in the shootout to help the Stars to a 3-2 win at TD Garden on Thursday night. Patrice Bergeron scored for the Bruins in the shootout, but Dallas goaltender Kari Lehtonen stopped Boston's other three shooters. Peverley won it for the Stars in the fourth round. Lehtonen and counterpart Tuukka Rask each made 34 saves in regulation and overtime. The Dallas-Boston trade was one of the biggest in the offseason, as the Bruins parted with two players who were integral parts of one team that won the Stanley Cup in 2011 and another that went to the Stanley Cup Final in June. Time and again, the Garden crowd reminded Seguin, who the Bruins selected with the No. 2 pick in the 2010 NHL Draft, that he was no longer in black and gold by booing him whenever he touched the puck and serenading him with a chant of "Se-guin, Se-guin" throughout the latter stages of the game.
"Obviously, it's a great game to win. It
will be nice to move on a little bit," he said. "This
has been in my head a little bit. You try and put it away when you
are playing other games, but it's still there. You are still thinking
about coming here to this town. Like I said, the win felt great."
Rask thought he knew the tendencies of his former
teammates before the shootout. In the end, even his puck-stopping
skills weren't enough to overcome the dramatics he knows often happen
when players go against their former teams for the first time.
"Shocking, yeah," Rask said
sarcastically. "You always face them in practice; it's a
different scenario than that. You think you know what they're going
to do, and then they do something else. So you know they were going
to score at some point. That's how it always goes when you play
against your old team, and they found a way to score a goal."
Seguin said he just wanted to try something
different on his former teammate. "If you want me to be very
honest, anyone who asks me, I said I honestly don't know what to tell
you. Tuukka is too good of a goalie. I could say the same thing about
our goalie; I wouldn't know where to shoot on him. In my head it was
kind of do something that you have never done before. I have never
really gone right and then gone left on Tuukka before and shot
high-blocker. I just tried to read what was open."
The Stars improved to 7-6-2 on the season and
2-0-0 through the first two games of their three-game road trip.
They'll conclude the trip against the Detroit Red Wings on Thursday.
"I think we're getting better,"
Peverley said. "We've definitely come a long way since
the start of the year. To come into this building and be able to get
two points, I think that's a big confidence booster for our team. I
think we've got to keep going and get better."
The Bruins have now lost two in a row and four of
their last five. They're 8-6-0 on the season. They hadn't lost to
Dallas at home since Jan. 14, 2006. Boston's five-game homestand
continues with the second game Thursday against the Florida Panthers.
Bruins coach Claude Julien was frustrated by his team's inability to
put the Stars away without reaching a shootout, particularly when
they held a 15-1 edge in shots on net during the latter stages of the
first period. The coach also pointed to the bad line change that led
to Vernon
Fiddler's game-tying penalty-shot goal with 2:34 remaining in
regulation as another example of his club's recent sloppy play.
Fiddler got behind Boston defenseman Dennis
Seidenberg, who had just jumped on the ice, and drew a hooking
penalty. Fiddler then roofed a backhander over Rask to tie the game
at 2-2.
"Well, it came down to a shootout because
we played at the level of the other team," Julien said. "And
not to take anything away from them, but I'd like to think we're a
better team than what we showed tonight. The first 10 minutes were
good, and then we got back to some our old habits. Eventually, when
you play that way, you find ways to lose hockey games. And that's
what we're doing right now; we're finding ways to lose.”
Milan
Lucic had given Boston a 2-1 lead at 11:39 of the third period
with a tip-in after a strong shift by his line, with center David
Krejci and right wing Jarome
Iginla, and the defense pair of Dougie
Hamilton and Seidenberg. Iginla won a battle in front that
allowed Krejci to retrieve a rebound and dish the puck back to
Hamilton at the blue line. The defenseman's wrister was timed perfect
for a Lucic tip through an Iginla screen. It took the Stars 3:38 to
put their first shot on goal, but they made the most of it. After
Zdeno Chara
knocked down Jordie
Benn's chip-in, Jamie
Benn picked up the puck along the right wall, skated to just
inside the right dot and beat Rask with a wrist shot inside the far
post for an early 1-0 Dallas lead. The Benn goal extended the Bruins'
streak of allowing the first goal to four games. The Bruins wasted
little time before answering. Torey
Krug forced his former teammate Peverley to turn over the puck
along the right wall of the Dallas zone. Carl
Soderberg passed the puck across the ice to Smith, who fed it
back to a streaking Krug for a goal from the left side of the slot at
4:16. The Bruins finished the period with an 18-10 advantage in shots
on goal, and the teams went to the dressing room tied 1-1. The Stars
carried over their late-period momentum into the second period. They
took over the lead in shots on net by outshooting Boston 13-4 over
the middle 20 minutes. Rask made all the saves, as did Lehtonen, who
had to be good to keep the puck out of the net on back-to-back Boston
power plays in the middle part of the period.
"I thought the guys responded well,"
Stars coach Lindy Ruff said. "We took the early penalty and
that gave them a little bit of momentum. They had us back on our
heels. Once we got midway through the period, we started to come
around. At the start of the second, our guys did a tremendous job. I
thought Benn and Tyler started the period with an unbelievable shift,
and I thought that turned the game."
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