MTL vs BOS

BOSTON - As Sunday’s entertaining, Wild West gunslinger of a Game 3 progressed with the Canadiens and Bruins tied 1-1, Boston coach Claude Julien had to be thinking he had them right where he wanted them.

After all, 1-1 games are the Bruins specialty, and they’re the types of games Julien has always lived for.

Habs coach Guy Carbonneau, however, is not accustomed to low-scoring affairs, not after his team surprisingly finished the regular season with the most goals in the NHL, and a little less surprisingly finished with its best power play.

That familiarity with the situation, Julien said, is what might have paid off in Sunday’s crucial 2-1 overtime win over the Canadiens that brought the Bruins right back into the series, down one game heading into Game 4 Tuesday night.

“What probably helped us is that we’ve had to play these kinds of games all year,” Julien said. “We haven’t been blessed with a lot of three or four goal leads, like some other teams have.”

Though he didn’t say it, Julien was probably referring to the Canadiens, and more specifically to the Canadiens in their games against the Bruins.

The Habs hex on the Bruins has now been lifted, but the important question is how Boston did it.

Milan Lucic, who scored his first career playoff goal and was a battering ram for the Bruins all night, said Boston had found a winning formula against Montreal. But really, the formula is not very complicated.

What’s happened here is that, somehow, Julien and his coaching staff have turned the third-worst penalty killing team in the league into a juggernaut, holding Montreal’s top-rated power play to a scant 1-for-17 performance through three games.

“That was a key factor before the series started,” Julien said. “On one side of it was our discipline, but we knew we would have to face it at some point. When you’re in a seven-game series, you have a lot more time to make your adjustments. In the regular season, you often don’t have the time to make those very specific adjustments you need.”

What that translates into is that, at least when it comes to this aspect of either team’s specialty units, Julien and his staff are getting the better of Carbonneau and his.

Carbonneau justifiably noted that the Bruins are not doing much better on the power play than his Canadiens are, with only one goal on 14 chances, and that goal came on a 5-on-3 advantage.

But the difference is that the Bruins didn’t get to where they are today on the strength of their power play, which finished 16th in the league this year. The Canadiens did rely heavily on their power play to surge to first in the Eastern Conference this year, and it’s not only about the goals they scored.

Once it was established this season that the Canadiens power play was as lethal as it was, teams had to change the way they played against them, not wanting to take the chance of getting overly physical for fear of landing in the penalty box.

The Bruins were guilty of that over-discipline, if you will, in Game 1 of the series, a little less so in Game 2, and that idea was completely thrown out the window for Game 3.

So now that Julien has made his adjustments - to the point Montreal only got two shots, let alone goals, on its five chances Sunday - what will Carbonneau do?

“We’ll adjust,” he said. “We’re trying to adjust every facet of our game.”

Whatever adjustments Carbonneau and his staff want to make, they’d better do it quickly or else this series could be heading back to Montreal deadlocked.