MTL vs BOS

MONTREAL - Maybe Guy Carbonneau was playing coy.

Maybe he simply didn’t want the Boston Bruins to know what would be awaiting them Thursday night at the Bell Centre.

Or maybe he simply didn’t know his Montreal Canadiens would show up for Game 1 of their first-round playoff matchup with the Bruins ready to lay a physical beating on their opponents.

Thursday morning, when Carbonneau was asked how his team would respond if the Bruins tried to wear them down physically, he alluded to the Canadiens moving the puck quicker and getting some odd-man rushes out of situations where Boston’s players would get out of position trying to lay a big hit.

But instead of the Bruins being the aggressors, it was the Canadiens who won the physical battle, out-hitting Boston by a clear margin of 37-25 in their easy 4-1 win at home in front of a rabid crowd of 21,273 at the Bell Centre.

“We’ve been playing like this since September, there’s nothing new to us. We’ve been playing like this every game, so we just have to keep doing what we’ve been doing for almost eight months,” Carbonneau said. “It’s our 83rd game of the season and every time people said there would be teams that would try to get us off our game by hitting us, we’ve always come out of it with more hits.”

The Canadiens were helped Thursday by the return of bruising defenceman Mike Komisarek from injury, but he was only credited with one of the 37 hits laid out by the Habs on an unsuspecting Bruins squad.

All but three members of the Canadiens were credited with at least one hit, and the player who best exemplified Montreal’s willingness to take the body was 5-foot-11, 196-pound rookie winger Sergei Kostitsyn. He was credited with three hits on the night, but he appeared to have at least three on every shift the way he was recklessly running all over the ice.

But it was Montreal’s third line that set the physical tone for the evening as Bryan Smolinski (2), Tom Kostopoulos (5) and Steve Begin (4) accounted for 11 of Montreal’s 37 hits.

Add in the fact both Kostopoulos and Smolinski scored, and you have a perfect night at the office for a checking line.

Bruins coach Claude Julien identified the work of Montreal’s third and fourth lines as a key determining factor in the game.

“I don’t think we played well, that’s the bottom line,” he said. “I think their physicality was a testament to how badly they wanted to win the game.”

The Bruins definitely won’t admit it, but they have to be wondering what they have to do to beat the Canadiens at this point.

While the Habs were running up a perfect 8-0 record against Boston this season, Alex Kovalev had seven goals and four assists while the Montreal power play connected at nearly a 30 per cent clip.

But Thursday, Bruins captain Zdeno Chara effectively eliminated Kovalev as a potential factor every time he touched the puck, and Boston’s 28th ranked penalty killing unit shut out the league’s top power play, including allowing only one shot on a two-minute 5-on-3 late in the third period.

In spite of that, Montreal’s winning streak against Boston now stands at 12 games over two seasons.

“It always pleasant to see other players at the forefront,” Carbonneau said. “What I was happy to see is that even though we had chances to score on the power play, it wasn’t the story of the game because we were able to score 5-on-5.”

If Montreal continues to do that, it could quickly become the story of the series.