Boston Bruins: Second Round Opponent Confirmed As Tampa

The Boston Bruins’ second round opponent in the Stanley Cup Playoffs has been confirmed as the Tampa Bay Lightning.

With the Philadelphia Flyers sending the Montreal Canadians home, the Boston Bruins face the second seed from the round-robin play-in tournament.

The Boston Bruins made a clear decision not to put too much focus on doing well in the seeding tournament, leading to this challenging match-up against our Atlantic Division rival.

In our most recent fixture with Tampa, we lost 3-2 though that game was during that round-robin tournament. In the regular season, we were on the losing side of the series, going down to them in 3 of our 4 fixtures.

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Needless to say they’re going to prove a challenging opponent, though the Columbus Blue Jackets did push them in the first round, including that 5OT epic.

Their series with Columbus should give the Bruins some clues as to how you stymie their attacks. The Blue Jackets never allowed Tampa to win by more than one goal, so there’s definitely a chance.

Perhaps key to slowing them down will be containing Brayden Point and Nikita Kucherov. They are on 10 and 9 points respectively this post-season. They’re shining with Steven Stamkos out of action, as has often been the case.

There is also a strong chance we can take advantage of them on the power play; they’ve yet to tally on the man advantage, while our penalty-kill has been quite impressive.

Likewise, our power play has been on fire; provided we can draw penalties, there’s another good chance to score.

Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bruins drawing Tampa is the fact that we’d likely have faced them in the second round regardless of the season suspension and reshuffling of the Stanley Cup Playoff seeding.

It’s not going to be an easy second round match-ups, but provided we protect Jaroslav Halak, it’s certainly a winnable match-up.