Hochman: Bruins do their best Blues impression, win with many unlikely heroes (and one helmet-less hit) – STLtoday.com

BOSTON — The “mirror” stuff was cute, wasn’t it? Oh, the Bruins and Blues, they look so much alike!

That was the talk heading into the Stanley Cup Final. And in Game 1, the Bruins did look like the Blues — a deep team that can beat you any night with anybody. But the Blues? They looked like the San Jose Sharks — unbalanced and over-matched.

Bruins 4, Blues 2. It’s just one loss, doesn’t count for anything more. But it stings — and not just because it’s in the Stanley Cup Final. It stings because the Blues led this game, in Boston, 2-0, and then the Bruins beat the Blues at their own game. It stings because the top three stars were Sean Kuraly, Marcus Johansson and Connor Clifton.

Did you know, before Monday, that all three of those humans were Boston Bruins?

The brutalizing Bruins won the same way the Blues won so many games this postseason — by having all four lines play furious hockey, with all three defensive lines contributing.

“We saw it,” the Blues’ David Perron said. “Their fourth line — their so-to-speak fourth line — got two goals. So they played well.”

That’s scary. This is alarming. Oh, and then look at it this way — the Blues kept Boston’s top guys from being great — in Boston. And the Blues still lost.

All that talk about how it takes all 16 skaters to win a tournament? Robert Bortuzzo scoring, Ivan Barbashev punishing, Oskar Sundqvist doing everything? It got the Blues here to the Stanley Cup Final. But it also got the Bruins here.

And Boston won the first chess match on ice, if only because the Bruins seemed to be playing with more pieces.

To win Game 2, the Blues must have their depth create more offense more often. Simple as that.

“There was no flow. You know?” Blues coach Craig Berube said of Game 1. “We didn’t have the flow of the lines one after another, getting to our game, getting on the forecheck. It was sporadic. We didn’t get it turned around good enough. …

“(The Bruins) are going to do good things. They’re going to force us into bad situations and things like that. We need to give more than we gave tonight. … In the second period, we got pucks and we didn’t advance them. Turned them over. Gave them momentum. … We stopped skating, stopped moving the puck, turned it over, gave them momentum.”

The three Boston goals with Jordan Binnington in net were scored by the most unlikely trio — third-line defenseman Clifton via five on five, defenseman Charlie McAvoy on the power play, and then fourth-liner Kuraly. Not exactly Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak. But they got the job done.

That Kuraly goal, giving Boston a 3-2 lead, had an impact reminiscent of the Blues’ fourth-line goal against San Jose in Game 3. The plays didn’t mirror themselves, no. But they were both beautiful surprises.

Against the Sharks in the Western Conference finals, Alexander Steen whipped an unreal, unexpected pass to Sundqvist for a game-rattling goal. Here in Game 1, a fellow named Noel Acciari zipped a pass across the crease to Kuraly, who put it in as Joel Edmundson just sort of stood there. In Game 1, the Blues’ D sure didn’t have depth.

But really, the play that encapsulated the game was made by Torey Krug. He’s one of the defensemen for Boston, a scrappy guy at 5-feet-9, 186 pounds. But he made a play they’ll be talking about for 48 hours. A play that was an emotional dagger in the Blues’ side. A play that might’ve been a penalty, but it appears he didn’t leave his feet until after the collision. A play that shows that if you’re going to win the Cup, everyone has to contribute — and not just by scoring or passing.

With the score 3-2, and the Blues slowly emerging from their embarrassing second-period form, Krug and Perron got into a scrap on the ice in front of Tuukka Rask, the Bruins’ goalie.

Krug’s helmet was flung off. No penalties, though. After he got up, a helmet-less Krug sprinted down ice like a special-teamer on a NFL kickoff . . . and rocked Robert Thomas to the ice. The Garden was as loud as it was when a goal was scored. 

Meanwhile, where were the bruising Blues? Where was St. Louis’ depth? What happened to the road swagger? Well, for one, Boston’s Bruins seem to be well-coached. They smother on defense. There is little room to skate. (Time? Nope. Space? Nah.) And the Bruins routinely stymied the Blues’ offensive attacks, cutting off cross-ice passes, ho-hum.

And second, the Bruins proved, for one night, that they are deeper than St. Louis.

“They have a lot of good players — they use everybody, all 16,’ said Berube, whose team plays Game 2 at TD Garden on Wednesday. “They’re a good team. We’re a good team, too, though. We have depth.”

Game 1 is just one game.

But it could be a Boston harbinger.