honestly this game was won by coaching
in the first there was that one shift where boeser flubbed that three on one with dick and someone else (richie?) and the knives came out, and then one poster launched into brock boeser performance art.
at that point, travis green would have said to him (or maybe just to himself, because green was a coward), that’s why you’re playing with fourth liners. take your sailors i condemn you to hell. esp since dries made that great play to set up petey’s goal.
but boudreau saw it the exact opposite way. you can’t have broken down, seasonal affective disorder boeser leading the rush like that, esp with no hands dickinson as his passing option. so he puts them both with petey to start the second and boeser makes not one, not two, but three i’m-getting-involved defensive plays to initiate the rush and then bury the one timer from petey.
the rest of the game, instead of failing at being the puck carrier and playmaker, he was doing generally positive things in the o-zone totally away from the play. he shifted back to the point at least three times and got off wide open shots, one of which led to the dick goal. he drifted to the side boards on his off wing and found openings. basically he found the sweet spot between too involved and not involved at all, which is exactly where he needs to be.
now is he a player we want on the team moving forward? idk. his limitations are still his limitations, and he’s not going to magically learn how to skate this summer like young horvat did. and at the end of the game, when he was defending against the empty net you could so obviously see he had no idea how to put his stick in the passing lane as dallas was bringing the puck up ice (that part is fixable, but overall he would need a full reprogramming). but my point is, instead of shooting him out of a cannon, bouds put him in a position to succeed and then he did. who was our last coach that would have done that? not green, not 1-2-3-4 willie, torts would have slapped him in the face during the intermission, definitely not AV. you’d have to go all the way back to pat quinn?