Bruins still alive in Eastern 1st Round after going with ‘something fresh’

BUFFALO -- Marco Sturm waited as long as he could.

“I was hiding,” he said, and laughed.

The Boston Bruins coach knew he was throwing a wrench at his team, his lines into a Vitamix, new combinations at his players before the start of a do-or-die Game 5 on the road against the Buffalo Sabres in the Eastern Conference First Round.

So, he wasn’t exactly eager to show them what he’d come up with. 

“I didn’t tell them till right before the game,” Sturm said Wednesday morning. “For sure, there were some question marks. But the way they reacted, the way they started the game, I thought they liked it. But again, something new. 

“That was the whole point -- we needed something fresh, I feel like. We didn’t want to go the same way again and again and we needed something fresh.”

It worked.

The Bruins responded with a 2-1 overtime win at KeyBank Center, extending their season and extending the best-of-7 series to Game 6 at TD Garden in Boston on Friday (7:30 p.m. ET; ESPN, TVAS2, SN360). It came after perhaps their worst period and loss of the season, a mess of a Game 4, a 6-1 loss that saw them down 4-0 by the end of the first period.

The innovation was partially based on necessity: Viktor Arvidsson was injured and did not make the trip to Buffalo. That meant Sturm’s most consistent line -- Casey Mittelstadt, Pavel Zacha and Arvidsson -- wouldn’t be intact.

So, why not mix it up further?

Suddenly, Zacha was centering Marat Khusnutdinov and David Pastrnak. Fraser Minten jumped to the second line with Mittelstadt and Morgan Geekie. And, perhaps most stunning, Sturm dropped Elias Lindholm from first-line center to third-line center, surrounded by two players making their series debuts, forwards Alex Steeves and Michael Eyssimont. 

Only the fourth line -- Tanner Jeannot, Sean Kuraly and Mark Kastelic -- was left untouched. 

“I liked it a lot,” Sturm said. “I’ve never done it before, so that was a question: Should we keep it a little bit the same, switch one or two guys around or really going to mix it up? I just had a better feeling going that way because of ‘Arvi’ being out. 

“I think the other big thing was (Zacha) had a few good shifts with David the night before, so I wanted to give it a try.”

He ended up making one in-game adjustment, moving Lindholm to the second line with Mittelstadt and Geekie and returning Minten to the third line. That one paid off quickly; Lindholm scored the Bruins’ first goal, tying it 1-1 at 9:24 of the second period.

It was that line again that set the stage for the overtime goal, with Pastrnak giving Lindholm’s group a nod as setting up the final shift of the game. That started with a defensive play by Khusnutdinov along the blue line to get the puck to Hampus Lindholm for the pass that sprung Pastrnak, just after he came on the ice after a line change. 

“He hunted pucks, he kept pucks -- that’s exactly why I wanted him to be in that line,” Sturm said, of Khusnutdinov. “This kid, he played a lot of minutes. When you have a guy like him, he was so exhausted. So, then I can tell he did his work.”

Those may be the Bruins’ combinations again for Game 6 on Friday. It was unclear, as of Wednesday, whether Arvidsson could be available.

“It’s going to be hard,” Sturm said. “It’s definitely day to day, but it will be hard.”

Knowing that Arvidsson wouldn’t play Tuesday, Sturm could have kept it simple. He could have used James Hagens or Lukas Reichel, each of whom played earlier in the series. He didn’t, instead defenseman Henri Jokiharju, who played six seasons in Buffalo, for his playoff debut, in place of Jordan Harris, who himself entered Game 4 in place of Mason Lohrei. 

“The loss the other night, that probably helped too a little bit,” Sturm said. “I wanted new energy. I wanted fresh energy. I needed more energy. I felt like these guys could give us that, and they did. All those three guys played hard. They gave us what we needed, but that’s what I was hoping for.”

There’s no guarantee it will work again, or even if Sturm will try it.

But the coach’s gamble worked, at least for one night. It shook up a team already shaken by its substandard play in Game 4. It pushed the Bruins to a win that extended their season for at least another three days.

“Nothing really changes for us,” Sturm said of what’s ahead in Game 6. “Going in here we had a mission, a one-game mission, and nothing will change. We will have a one-game mission again going home. We were really looking forward to it. 

“We take today to rest. Tomorrow, we’re back to business.”