Babcock on Game 3: “We were off-kilter right from the get-go”

Photo by Jen Hefner/MiHockey

 

By Stefan Kubus –

DETROIT – The Boston Bruins blanked a lackluster Detroit Red Wings group Tuesday night at Joe Louis Arena in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals, 3-0.

Dougie Hamilton, Jordan Caron and Patrice Bergeron scored, while Tuukka Rask made 23 saves for his first shutout of the postseason. Jimmy Howard made 31 of 34 saves in the loss.

“I’m not trying to take anything away from them, because they played well; they were better than us all night long, but we gave them two goals,” Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock said. “It’s almost like the energy in the building, the excitement or whatever, we didn’t handle that very good. We were off-kilter right from the get-go. We fumbled the puck, I didn’t think we got going at all until maybe 32 minutes into the game.”

Niklas Kronwall echoed similar thoughts and said the best remedy is to move on and prepare for the next one.

“If we sit around and feel sorry for ourselves, we’re not gonna go anywhere,” Kronwall said. “We’ll flush this one out, analyze what we can do better, which is a lot of things, and just get back to work.

“I didn’t think we gave ourselves a fair chance.”

Exactly nine minutes into the opening period and on the power play, Hamilton skated the puck out of his own zone on the breakout and carried it all the way into the Detroit zone. Streaking down the right wing uncontested, he let a wrist shot go and it beat Howard on the glove side to give his Bruins a 1-0 lead.

Six minutes later, on a bad Red Wings line change, Shawn Thornton broke in alone and got a shot off that Howard turned away. On the doorstep, Caron tapped it home on the rebound for the 2-0 lead. That’s how things stood through through not only after the first period – a lackluster one for Detroit – but also after the second period, too.

“Give them credit, they put a couple goals home right away there and that kind of took some life out of our sails there,” Red Wings defenseman and Clay Township native Danny DeKeyser said.

Brendan Smith was given a minor penalty for kneeing Brad Marchand at center ice. Marchand went down, but skated off on one leg with help from the trainer. The contact was made with Marchand’s left knee, yet he was interestingly protecting his right one when he skated off. In any event, Marchand did return shortly after.

Detroit did have 35 seconds of 5-on-3 time in the middle frame, but could not get any sort of offense generated against Rask and the rugged Bruins defense. And that held up as the story the rest of the way out.

“We’ve got to be better, and I thought we got better as the game went along, but we still need to generate quality chances and get to the net,” DeKeyser said.

Game 4 is Thursday night at Joe Louis Arena with puck drop slated for 8 p.m.