The Blues broke the Bruins mentally and physically in that 3rd period. They were shying away from contact like a badly beaten dog.
5 on 5, the story is the same. The Blues are just better. St Louis is outscoring the B’s 8-5. Without the benefit of 4-5 power plays, we saw what the Bruins offense is. This was the case in the regular season, so it shouldn’t be surprising now.
The Bruins have been beaten down, and are now down to their last remaining defensemen and will have to turn to some unconventional lineups going forward. The Blues have the advantage going forward, and I think will finish off the Bruins in Game 5.
So we're going to pretend like Game 1 didn't happen and that Game 2 wasn't the result of some lackadaisical and fluky plays? Has that dude Krug leveled even played again yet? The Bruins are getting beat up, it's true, but they're not dropping like flies. Grzylcek was boarded from behind be some toolbag who probably barely made the cut and wasn't a big loss for the Blues for one game (even if it was the lopsided 7-2 game; Sundqvist wasn't going to prevent 6 of those goals on his own) and Chara got the bad end of a slapshot to the face but hasn't even been officially ruled out for Game 5 yet (and, as others have said, could get wired and still go out there if he wanted to. Maybe he Bruins aren't playing as physically as they should but that might be part of the game plan since St. Louis was hailed as a big, physical, fast team coming in, a team that fed off contact and physical play because they could outmuscle most other teams. By not feeding into that plan of attack and focusing on skating and shooting, the Bruins are forcing the Blues to be a little more crafty and it's led to a pair of wins. The issue is that the Bruins aren't shooting often enough and maybe guilty of too many fancy passes to try to set up pretty goals. They are also letting the Blues get away with murder, though there's that old aphorism that the refs always see the retaliatory hit and not the one that started it, so they may be trying to draw penalties with little success. Maybe with three games left, two at home, they will start laying the smack down out there since they know they can beat Binnington and their only home loss in this series came largely because of a really bad decision by Marchand and a fluky bounce.
This was always going to be a physical series but most have predicted Bruins in 6 or 7 and it's lined up to play out exactly that way. I do get some shades of 2011 in this series but I really like their chances of winning two out of three with two in Boston, especially since they blew St. Louis out in Game 3 and were competitive throughout most of Game 4. I do think Cassidy needs to take a page out of Berube's book and start campaigning for embellishment calls and calls in general, but I'm not really worried yet. I'd also love to see Rask take a page out of Thimas's book and dump truck the next Blues player that gets too close to him in the crease, more if necessary, so they maybe have to start thinking twice of running him or even being in the same ZIP code.
Finish checks, shoot a ton of pucks at Binnington, and play smart. If they do those three things, they got this.