There is no lonelier feeling in sports. Heading into overtime of Game 6 of an Eastern Conference quarterfinal series, Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas settled into his net and had to fight the obvious thought.
“In the quiet times,” Thomas said, “you realize one shot and our season’s over.”
The Bruins, down 3-2 in the series to the Capitals and engulfed by a roaring Verizon Center crowd after Alex Ovechkin’s late goal tied the score, needed to regroup. Thomas turned aside two Washington chances over the final four minutes and another in overtime before teammate Tyler Seguin kept Boston’s season alive with his overtime goal in a 4-3 victory Sunday.
Caps rookie goalie Braden Holtby had little chance to stop Seguin, who had speed and plenty of space to use it on the winner. Holtby sprawled on the ice but missed a chance to poke the puck away, and Seguin had an open net. Moments earlier, Boston defenseman Zdeno Chara patiently held the puck and rang a shot off the crossbar.
“That’s a save that I want to make, and I should have learned from the play before that on Chara that they were going to try and out-wait like that if they had time,” Holtby said. “It was my fault.”
Holtby finished with 27 saves on 31 shots. It was far from his best game of the series, but he at least has given the seventh-seeded Caps a chance to win every single night in his first Stanley Cup playoffs appearance.
Thomas, on the other hand, is a grizzled veteran at age 38. He didn’t have much work late but was there early when Boston needed him. Thomas finished with 36 saves on 39 shots and made up for his disappointing Game 5.
“I know [Thomas] was upset [Saturday]. Just by his reaction I had no doubt in my mind he was going to come up big today,” Bruins coach Claude Julien said. “He was up early this morning having breakfast, and you could see he was prepared. And he did a great job for us. We got outshot. It seems to be the trend in this series — the team that gets outshot normally wins.”
