It takes a lot for a team that has the "big and bad" reputation to not engage in retaliatory actions. The Bruins have been marked as easy targets for the penalty box, and every team is the league is hoping to poke the Bear, but at a safe distance.
According to head coach Claude Julien, it's lonely after winning the Stanley Cup, and, as paranoid as it sounds, every other team has it against them and wants to see them taken down.
" Listen, we're being challenged a lot more than ever now because teams know how we play, especially teams that watched us play right 'till the end; teams that have won championships- other teams like to share information to try and beat those teams," Julien said before Tuesday night's game against Ottawa. "So there is nothing that's hidden or that's a secret about our game anymore and the one thing that's pretty obvious and I can say publicly is that teams don't- will not engage with us right now because they're being told 'they feed off that' so we've seen that. Right now, the minute we retaliate, we're being penalized for that stuff so we have to be smarter we have to find ways to get around that."
And they did.
The Bruins were tagged for six penalties--two of which were fighting majors-- and didn't allow a single goal against the top-ranked power play team in the league. Meanwhile, the Senators took 10 penalties, and the B's were able to capitalize on one.
"I think it was pretty obvious by the end of the game we had done exactly what we wanted to do," Julien said after the win. "They were frustrated, they were retaliating, and it was because of our play, and that’s what we’d talked about. I think we were going about it the wrong way earlier on, trying to entice people to engage with us, and we were caught retaliating. Basically, you just take charge of your game, go in there, be physical, be in their face, and eventually it frustrates the other team, and that’s why you saw some of those couples at the end. It was certainly not of our own doing."
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