Bruins’ P&V vision on full display in Sunday night’s comeback win

The Boston Bruins came out of the locker room flatter than most fans would've expected for Sunday afternoon's matchup with the Columbus Blue Jackets. The team played one of its most impressive games of the season against the Minnesota Wild on Saturday afternoon, and it should've left the group motivated for Sunday, but the first period was ugly.

When Don Sweeney and the front office built this team in the offseason, they had a clear goal: make the roster bigger, tougher, and harder to play against. There has been a big change in the culture, and it would've been impossible for last year's team to come back from a 3-0 deficit. Make no mistake: the Bruins' move to make this team tougher led to Sunday's result.

It all started with David Pastrnak, who can say he didn't hear the late whistle on an offside call, but one has to wonder whether he fired a shot at Jett Greaves after the whistle to start a scrum and get his team more emotionally engaged. Pastrnak isn't going to fight anybody, but he can do those types of things with more confidence when he has players like Mark Kastelic and Tanner Jeannot on his bench.

Kastelic and Jeannot finished what Pastrnak started later in the first period with back-to-back fights that started to change the momentum of the game. Jeannot had a marathon bout with Erik Gudbranson that you can give the decision to the Bruins' power forward, but his fellow fourth-line winger didn't think that it was enough to get the sleepy Boston team back up off the mat.

Unfortunately, Kastelic got his lunch handed to him by Mathieu Olivier in the next bout, but it was the fact that he stood in there with the Blue Jackets enforcer for nearly a full minute that sent a shockwave through the team, as evidenced by Marco Sturm's post-game comments.

""I didn't want to give up. And these guys worked too hard, and those two guys (Jeannot and Kastelic) set the bar so high at the end of the first ... I didn't want to lose that fight.""

Marco Sturm

It wasn't just the coach who recognized what the Bruins' fourth-liners done. The players appreciated it just as much, and showed it after the game. Everyone who threw shots at the front office's strategy in the preseason might be eating their words now that Boston is winning games because of this style.

The good news is that it could only get better from here. Once the playoffs come around, it's still the toughest teams that succeed in that atmosphere. No matter how much people try to move away from the physical side of hockey, it's always going to have a place in the NHL.