"It was definitely a good feeling to beat your old team here in Montreal and get the last one," said Ryder. "I've kind of forgotten about what happened last year. But it was good to beat your old team. I'm a Bruin now. It's a lot of fun."
The team that let Ryder walk last summer was also the organization that cut Claude Julien loose in 2006. It was the team that has been Boston's perpetual nemesis, forever bouncing the Bruins and winning Stanley Cups. It was the team that booted the Bruins out of the playoffs last season after a seven-game slugfest.
And now it's the team that saw its 100th season come to a whimpering close, the latest chapter slammed shut by a behemoth of a Boston club that rolled to a 4-1 victory before 21,273 at the Bell Centre and swept the NHL's most glorious franchise in their best-of-seven first-round playoff series.
It was only appropriate that Julien masterminded the discipline-first Bruins and Ryder drove the offensive bus by tucking two pucks behind a shellshocked Carey Price.
"There's a lot of pressure playing against his old team and maybe trying to be conservative," said Aaron Ward of Ryder. "But he stepped up. He's been great for us."
For the Bruins, this was a series about keeping their cool. In the last regular-season meeting, the Bruins, led by chief culprits Milan Lucic and Shawn Thornton, blew their tops and tried to deliver frontier justice to the Canadiens. Entering the playoffs, the Bruins knew the shorthanded Canadiens (missing defenseman Andrei Markov and center Robert Lang for the entire series, while forward Alex Tanguay and defenseman Mathieu Schneider sat out last night's game) would try to entice them into taking penalties.
The Bruins didn't bite.
"I think that was our biggest thing: discipline," said Marc Savard, whose team gave up only eight power plays, blanking the Canadiens on all eight. "We didn't talk to the refs. We didn't complain. We just went out and played hockey. We took some shots that we shouldn't have taken and there probably should have been more penalties. But we just kept playing and kept looking for the end result."
Conversely, the Canadiens gave the Bruins 16 power plays over four games. The Bruins scored on four.
