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Bruins’ Patrice Bergeron leaves regular-season finale with injury, team says it’s ‘precautionary’
Patrice Bergeron and the Bruins are expected to commence their Cup run early next week.
For the second game in a row, the Bruins pulled a star player off the ice for precautionary reasons.
With the Stanley Cup Playoffs just days away, the Bruins announced that Patrice Bergeron would not return to Boston’s regular-season finale on Thursday night due to an upper-body injury.
Boston noted in its injury announcement that the decision to sit Bergeron against the Canadiens was “precautionary”.
The Bruins captain logged 5:35 of the ice time during the first period of Thursday’s contest at Bell Centre, winning eight of nine faceoffs. Bergeron closed out his 19th regular season with 58 points (27 goals, 31 assists) over 78 games while winning 61 percent of his faceoffs.
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Postgame, Jim Montgomery told reporters that Bergeron was fine — adding that the veteran “wanted to go back out” to finish the game.
On Tuesday night, it was Linus Ullmark who was pulled from the TD Garden ice. The Vezina Trophy frontrunner exited the game with 9:39 left in regulation after appearing to tweak something while sealing off the right post.
Even though Ullmark did not skate on Wednesday or travel to Montreal, Jim Montgomery has continued to stress that the netminder’s on-ice absence is a result of the team simply playing it safe.
The Bruins are also erring on the side of caution with Bergeron, considering that Boston might commence its Cup run as early as Monday night.
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But given that the Bruins — having already secured both playoff positioning and a slew of NHL records — had little else to play for up in Montreal, many eyebrows were raised at Boston rolling out a close-to-full lineup for Game No. 82.
Ahead of puck drop, Bergeron explained why he wanted to play in Boston’s final regular-season matchup.
“Throughout these last few weeks I think we’ve done some of that, resting guys and healing some of the bumps and bruises of the season,” Bergeron said. “But as we got closer to playoffs we thought it was a good idea to play some games and get involved in those before the start [of playoffs].
“It’s usually a quick turnaround so you want to stay sharp,” Bergeron continued. “And for us, I think we want to work on things and get better and also it makes us stick to our process and our details that we’ve talked about all year, that we’re in the moment and we want to worry about tonight’s game rather than next week.”
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