Coach Claude Julien described his team in the one word that kind of leaves people with a wide range of emotions:
Comfortable.
He said before the game that he was speaking with the coaches and he thought the team came into the locker room a little bit too comfortable today.
"Sometimes it’s, you can feel the looseness in the dressing room," Julien said. "Like I’ve been here now for, this is starting my fifth year, and you kind of learn to read your team better all the time. And tonight I came in and I told my coaches and I even brought that to their attention before the game. I said, you know what, we seem a little loose in here. We might want to focus a little bit better because we’re going to be surprised if we’re not.
And whether it’s too late or not, sometimes you got to, it depends how you show up at the rink. If you show up at the rink a certain way, you can’t just turn the switch off and then decide all of a sudden you’re going to change your attitude. It’s how you wake up in the morning, it’s how you see the game. And if you come to the rink then you are. If you come to the rink unprepared then it shows."
If there's one thing the Bruins can't be, it's comfortable. While the team vowed that they would overcome the whole "Stanley Cup Hangover" that everyone has been so concerned about, comfort is something that hasn't been brought up a whole lot this preseason or into the regular season.
And after today's game you can see what being comfortable can do to you.
The Avalanche won a big battle against the Bruins today. They are a young team who quite literally pushed the Big Bad Bruins around to the point where a single goal determined the game. Not only was it just a one-goal win, but it was the first goal the Avalanche had scored all season. They maintained the lead once they had it, and you can bet that they were about as comfortable as Julien was sitting in the press room in front of the cameras.
"Well the thing is if you let them play their game, they’re young, they’re skilled, they got, when you keep drafting high, you got some pretty good players in your lineup and that’s it," Julien said. "I think they’re young, they’re a young hockey club a little bit like Edmonton is right now, and when you give them the opportunity to play, they can do a lot of damage. But had we gone out there and just played our game, played a hard game and made it hard on them, it would have been a little bit different."
So while the lines are still trying to click and form, and players are getting used to each others' techniques, the one hope is that players don't start to become comfortable in their positions. Because as Julien pointed out after the game today, if there is no production, including the production from the top line, he plans on switching things up.
"It’s part of our job here to get those guys going," Julien said. "Whether it’s through breaking them up or whether it’s through meetings, we’ve got to find a way to get those guys going."