Bruins are equal to this task

With a little grit, they tie the Stars

[ Game summary ]

By Kevin Paul Dupont, Globe Staff, 2/26/2003

he final score - a 5-5 tie with the mighty Dallas Stars - indicates it was more of the same last night for the win-challenged Bruins. Slouching toward playoff oblivion, they have now gone a half-dozen games without a victory, and their hold on a postseason berth is that of a winded passenger, running down the platform, reaching in desperation for the back rail of the caboose.

''Look at the standings,'' mused Glen Murray, whose second goal of the night, with 1:40 left in regulation, salvaged the precious point before a crowd of 17,280 at the Vault. ''It doesn't take a genius to know what's going on.''

They need wins, sooner rather than later, if they are to avoid missing the playoffs for a fourth time in seven seasons. But perhaps more important, they need to show more of the emotion, grit, and determination they displayed in impressive flashes when finally back on their home rink for the first time in two weeks.

After stumbling badly out of the gate, again, the Bruins erased deficits of 1-0, 4-2, and 5-4, ultimately chiseling the point when Murray rammed home his 32d of the season on a cross-slot pass from Jumbo Joe Thornton on a power play.

It was, in many ways, not the game the Bruins wanted to play. Prescription for disaster: get into a run-and-gun game with arguably the strongest club in the Western Conference. Even worse, come out with a tentative approach that found the Stars in a 1-0 lead at 11:09 of the first, Jere Lehtinen's goal coming on Dallas's 11th shot on Steve Shields. At the other end, the Bruins by then had only one shot on Ron Tugnutt.

''I don't know,'' offered head coach Robbie Ftorek, who opened his postgame news conference with that answer - before anyone had asked a question.

When someone then asked Ftorek what the question was, he offered, ''I don't know that, either - or what went on out there.''

What he knew for sure, though, was that his beleaguered team didn't execute the game plan he wanted from the opening faceoff. The idea, back on home ice after a dreadful 1-4-2 road trip, was to take the game to the opposition. Instead, his 18 skaters showed up like sparring partners, and the hard-skating Stars were only too happy to run roughshod over them for the first 11-plus minutes.

''We didn't start out well,'' said Ftorek, who has had to say that all too often the last 11-plus weeks as his club has fallen from the top seed in the East to a near also-ran. ''A game plan we didn't follow. It was helter-skelter for a while. Then as bad as we were in the first half of the period, we were good in the second half.''

''We gave 'em too much respect,'' added Shields, who made his second straight start ahead of Jeff Hackett and turned back 39 shots, ''and that put us back on our heels. We can't afford to do that.''

Before the first period was out, the Bruins knotted it, 1-1, with Thornton's 32d this year, a power-play strike with only 39 seconds to go. In the second, Brian Rolston connected for his first of two at 11:02, but the Stars came back with a quick dagger, striking only 17 seconds later when Jason Arnott alley-ooped in a feed off the wing by Ulf Dahlen. The run-and-gun portion of the night's meal had been served.

''Not the type of game we want to get into,'' noted Shields. ''Lately, it seems each time the other team gets a good chance, it ends up in our net.''

The next Dallas shot to land in the twine came with 3:51 left in the second when Sergei Zubov snapped in a long wrister off a faceoff to Shields's left for a 3-2 lead that would hold up through the break.

Then came the wild-and-crazy five-goal third period. Ex-Bruin Bill Guerin (7 shots in just over 20 minutes) walked off the goal line with only 38 seconds gone and swept the 4-2 lead past Shields. Soon after came what looked like the show-closer when Krzysztof Oliwa took down Mike Modano with a high stick that put the Stars on the power play for four minutes.

But what looked like certain doom actually proved to be the point at which the Bruins turned the night around, and in a hurry. Rolston, working the penalty-kill with P.J. Axelsson, raced down to score on a backhander only 32 seconds into the man-down situation. The penalty chewed up, Murray then riveted in the equalizer at 7:53 when Thornton dished a perfect feed into the slot from behind the net.

The endless midwinter nightmare then looked to play out in another horrid chapter when old nemesis Claude Lemieux banged in the 5-4 lead with 11:02 remaining in regulation. Left with a near-impossible angle on the goal line, to Shields's right, Lemieux zipped in a backhander for what looked to be the winner.

However, with 1:40 left, the quick-shooting Murray, with four shots on the night, ripped home the cross-slot feed from Thornton.

''We can't have a run-and-gun game with a team like that,'' said Murray. ''The majority of the time, it's not going to end in our favor.''

Little has gone their way for three months, in large part their own doing. The Bruins got away with a lot last night, and got away with a point. A place to start or another warning sign in a challenged season? Only 20 games left to find out the answer.

This story ran on page F1 of the Boston Globe on 2/26/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.