BOSTON —Jim Montgomery thought the Bruins took a big step forward in Thursday’s 6-4 win over Montreal from its struggles in Tuesday’s 6-4 loss to Florida.
He thought his team brought more energy and willingness to compete.
“We wanted to win a lot more battles,” he said. “I thought we won a lot more battles in all three zones and playing faster. I think we can see what kind of team we can be.”
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Still, he won’t have a lack of things he wants to address at Friday’s practice. He didn’t like seeing the Bruins allow two third-period goals to turn a comfortable 5-2 lead into a 5-4 nailbiter before Mark Kastelic’s second goal sealed the game with four minutes left.
“We’ve got to become a better checking team and understand game management a little bit better,” he said. “I didn’t think our game management was exemplary in the third, but it’s hard to win in this league. We got our first win. We just keep building.
“We got to clean things up. I mean, we gave up two faceoff goals,” he continued. “We had four icings tonight that I didn’t like — two ended up causing goals, and two ended up with them going on the power play. So that’s the part of the game management part that we need to be better at.”
Nikita Zadorov, agreed.
“I think we were pretty good offensively today. I thought we were hard on the forecheck. We stripped a lot of pucks,” he said. “Thought we were really good up there defensively. There’s a lot of room to improve. I think we’ll be fine. You know, we got a new group. We tweaked the system a little bit just to get used to it.”
