The B's took out Big D

My personal 3 stars of the game (having not seen the official ones):

1. Marc Savard - two awesome goals, great PK work, a lot of hustle and instant chemistry with Mike Ryder proved to work to his advantage. And Savvy is now 1 goal away from 200 career goals. Who was hoping for a hat-trick? This girl! And apparently Coach, since he had Sav out at every opportunity in the last 5:00.

2. Tim Thomas - do I really need to explain why?

3. This one was hard, so I'm awarding a two-way tie to Andy Ference and Matt Hunwick. Andy for his hustle, great forecheck, endless work on each PK shift, throwing the hits out like rubbers at a bachelor's party, and just irritating the Stars in general. Matt for basically the same reason AND trying to play goal when Timmy was caught out of net. Once a year it seems one of the D-men doubles up as unprotected goalies, and I think they should starting giving extra hardhat consideration for that. Particularly considering THEY'RE NOT WEARING CAGES.

Now that those are out of the way, onto the game.

Obviously I'm not going to be the first person to say BEST GAME OF THE YEAR despite that 7-2 blowout over the Canes. But with Bergeron taking the first penalty of the game :18 into the 1st, my heart sank. And then... and then... THEY KILLED IT! With APLOMB! And as the seconds ticked by I stopped wanting to chew my nails and throw things. I wouldn't let myself be optimistic though. I kept checking the time, I kept checking the PK time, but most of all I really liked watching the boys playing in the attacking zone most of the night. I'm thinking the NHL's "Event Summary" stats are somewhat incorrect as they're listing Ference with 1 hit and Hunwick with 0, and I saw them hit a lot more than that. This was an awesome, hit-filled game played with confidence, played with consistency, and played by the Bruins everyone is used to seeing play. I was also very impressed with Johnny Boychuk, who did NOT impress me too much in his first NHL game, but this time out, he made well-timed plays, had some nice hits, was a lot more calm and collected on the blue line, and was only caught out of place once or twice. Very worth noting - NO ONE on the team had <10:00 TOI, so no bike riding for anyone last night.

In the end, the boys in black and gold walked (flew) out of Big D with the TKO. And Timmy's first shutout of the season. Well done, boys. Keep it up in Phoenix.

I was going to post some photos, but neither Getty nor AP have any really great ones. What's up with the weak photo representation there, photographers? I'll put up flickr feed on the sidebar to rep the fans that are picking up the slack of the professionals.

Lastly, I don't get anything out of this, no discounts or anything, but Chowdaheadz has a new Bruins shirt. I ordered one last night, and at the low-low price of $12.99, you should consider it too, cause how wicked cool is this?

Click the image to go to the purchase page.