While the Bruins are hot, most of their starts are not

We get it, it’s hard to complain about anything the Boston Bruins are doing right now. The team is on an eight-game win streak, they have points in their last 12 games and they are tied for top spot in the Eastern Conference with the Washington Capitals, although the Bs do have a game in hand. But if there is one complaint about how they are playing, it’s that they tend to come out a bit flat early in most games. Fortunately, the team has been dominant in the latter part of games, hence the hot streak. They’ve been so dominant in third periods recently that they haven’t allowed a goal in the final 20 minutes in four games and have a plus-19 in goal differential in third periods this year.

The Boston Herald asked head coach Bruce Cassidy why Boston seems to carry themselves so well in third periods and he chocked it up to conditioning and competitiveness, among other key points.

“There’s certainly our conditioning. We’ve been a well-conditioned team here for years. I think there’s our competitiveness inside our locker room. Guys want to win. They want to win in a small-ice game (in practice), so they certainly want to win when it matters. I think a bit of it can be related to structure. I don’t think we panic. We stay within our game in that regard. And then there’s the composure, which I guess would go with the panic part. I think our guys are fine. They’re comfortable in a 0-0 game, they’re comfortable in tie games, comfortable having to kill a third period penalty, which tells me we’re confident. I think a lot of teams, honestly, aren’t confident in those situations. We are, and we’ve won a lot of those games and it has to do with veterans in the room and recent success.”

There’s also, of course, the goaltending tandem of Tuukka Rask and Jaroslav Halak, the envy of many teams in the league. There aren’t a lot of teams in the NHL that can be as confident as they Bruins can be regardless of which of their goalies is between the pipes. And, it shows. Cassidy also credits the growth of younger players who have been taking up the slack with veteran forward Patrice Bergeron on the sidelines.

“We put (Anders Bjork) out there (Tuesday) night, I thought he had a tremendous shift. Good growth for him. I think there was two and half minutes left. It was a puck possession play by him. He held on to it, didn’t make a risky play after holding on to it, so he’s earned the trust of the coaching staff, so clearly he was confident in that situation for a number different reasons.”

While teams never want to have slow starts in any games, perhaps it really doesn’t matter when you’re killing it in the third and getting the Ws the way the Bruins are right now.