Frustrating Game 2 boils over with David Pastrnak-Matthew Tkachuk fight
The Bruins were in Wednesday’s Game 2 head-to-head with the Panthers until they weren’t.
Down by just two after 40 minutes of play, and facing a multi-goal deficit after Gustav Forsling’s last-second strike to close out the middle frame, the Bruins were very much in it. But Jim Montgomery then watched Game 2 slip out of his club’s hands with a stretch that featured three goals in the opening 11:58 of the third, including the final two coming in a 1:06 span.
And then off came the gloves, and while just about every player got in on the shenanigans, it was a nasty third headlined by a scrap between the Bruins’ David Pastrnak and Florida’s Matthew Tkachuk.
It was not a fight that’s going to make a Halftime Pizza highlight reel some 20 years from now, but Pastrnak’s willingness to go, especially as a non-fighter, was not lost on his team.
“It’s gonna be a series, and what I’m really proud of? I’m proud of Pasta,” Montgomery said following the series-tying loss at Sunrise’s Amerant Bank Arena. “Because there’s so many guys out there pushing after whistle and the linesman are there [but] Pasta and Tkachuk, they just went out there and fought. That’s what you like. You like your hockey players to be competitors.”
“I mean, you don’t see that often,” B’s captain Brad Marchand offered. “It’s great for him to step up. I mean, you know, he doesn’t fight often. He’s actually pretty tough.”
It was also a fight that Pastrnak, who came into tonight’s game with just one career fight (a Mar. 2018 scrap against Dan Girardi), didn’t seem to run from, with Pastrnak appearing to agree to a scrap with Tkachuk before the two hit the ice after a run-in on their previous shift.
“He was asking me,” Pastrnak confirmed. “So I felt like, I’d step up.”
Pastrnak also expressed that he was willing to ‘step up’ for his team because at that point the game was over, and it was about message-sending more than anything else at that point in the night. Pastrnak also made it clear that he didn’t have any sort of reservations about taking on a customer like Tkachuk.
“Well, I mean, you are in the game [and] it’s a lot of emotions,” Pastrnak said of taking on Tkachuk (24 fights in his NHL career). “I’m not afraid of him. I can take a punch.”
If there was one thing the Bruins had a problem with, however, it was Tkachuk throwing extra punches at Pastrnak after Pastrnak had fallen down, which is typically frowned upon when it comes to “The Code.”
Pastrnak opted not to comment on that part of it, and Montgomery made his feelings on the matter known without saying enough to get himself in any potential trouble with the league.
“It’s not part of the game, for me,” Montgomery said of Tkachuk’s extra shots. “But I’m not going to comment on players on other teams. I just worry about my own players.”
Panthers head coach Paul Maurice, meanwhile, called the Pastrnak-Tkachuk “awesome,” and added that he believes that the brewing Bruins-Panthers rivalry is great for the NHL.
And with the intensity of this series ratcheted up, it’s perhaps only fitting that it’ll make its way to a surely-rowdy TD Garden for what will be a Friday night Game 3 showdown.
