Burrows beat both of them.
Burrows attacked the net to pull Thomas out of his crease. The Canucks’ No. 1 right wing then fought off Chara’s check as he peeled around the net. Then, with Thomas too far gone, Burrows tucked the puck into the empty net after only 11 seconds had ticked away.
And just like that, the Bruins had dropped a 3-2 decision at Rogers Arena and fallen into an 0-2 crevasse in the Stanley Cup Final.
“It [stinks] right now that we weren’t able to come out on top with a win here,’’ said Milan Lucic, who netted the Bruins’ first goal, in the second period. “We’ve just got to work that much harder in order to win.’’
For the first two games, the Bruins have gone toe-to-toe with the league’s best team on enemy ice. They have lost by just one goal in each setback.
But oh, do those goals hurt.
In Game 1, only 18.5 seconds remained in regulation when Raffi Torres slipped the only puck past Thomas. Last night, the Canucks delivered their second haymaker by making overtime last a mere 11 seconds.
This morning, when the Bruins board their charter flight home (wheels up at 8 local time), their mission will be simple: release and reload.
“We’ve been able to bounce back before,’’ said coach Claude Julien. “We’ve gone through the experience of being down two games to none against Montreal. That was probably worse because we lost them at home. Is it a better team here? Absolutely. The team that makes it to the Final is a better team. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve been through it. We didn’t come here just to roll over.’’
The Bruins did many things right last night. Their first line, after a quiet Game 1 and a yawn of a first period, came alive in the second. Lucic scored a goal on two shots. David Krejci was back to his puckhandling self, putting four shots on goal and getting multiple looks against Vancouver’s makeshift shutdown duo of Kevin Bieksa and Aaron Rome. The power play, a punch line the entire postseason, busted through when Recchi netted his first man-advantage goal since Jan. 10 to give the Bruins a 2-1 lead.
