Berube pulls all the right strings to push Blues to brink of Stanley Cup

You could pick any number of points when the game was decided.

Was it when Jordan Binnington stood tall in the face of an all-out assault for the entirety of the first period? Was it when Ryan O’Reilly scored the first goal almost immediately in the second period to take the wind out of the home team’s sails? Was it the no-call on that clear-as-day Tyler Bozak trip that precipitated the David Perron game-winner?

It could be any of them. You get to pick. But the result itself is now officially more important than any number of potential turning points that created it. That’s because apart from an appalling first period, the Blues’ defense was as smothering as could be expected against a team as good as the Bruins: They abandoned almost all attempts at offense and allowed just 26 shot attempts at 5-on-5 in the final two periods. Fewer than half of them were from medium- or high-danger areas.

That was the difference in the game, which the Blues won 2-1 to push the Stanley Cup Final to 3-2. And because it all happened in this postseason, it wasn’t without controversy. At least one uncalled potential headshot. One clear screw-up that any competent atom-level referee should have seen from the other end of the ice. Two no-goals getting reviewed, and all the rest.

You hate to keep harping on the officiating but this was a clear case of “lobbying the media works” once again working to Craig Berube’s favor. The missed trip that directly resulted in St. Louis’s goal was “these-guys-shouldn’t-work-again-this-season” bad and will rightly be the big subject of conversation until Sunday’s Game 6.

As for all the other stuff, you have to say the Bruins hadn’t really opened the faucets like this since Game 1. The first was unequivocally the second-best period in the series by either team, trailing only Boston’s second period in the opener, in which it outshot St. Louis 18-3 and out-chanced them 14-3.

The Bruins went 17-8 in shots and 15-7 in scoring chances, and apart from one opportunity right on the doorstep that had to be reviewed, Tuukka Rask wasn’t much bothered by anything he faced. At 5-on-5, he might as well have brought a crossword to work on for a big chunk of the first.

It wasn’t really a surprise that Boston came out of the gates white hot, with captain Zdeno Chara returning to the lineup. The Chara return is certainly the run-through-a-brick-wall kind of return that gets the boys ready to go. Someone had to have helped Chara do the fiery pregame speech, since his jaw is apparently wired shut, but no words were needed. Look across the room and see a 42-year-old giant with a broken jaw lace up the skates and it’s go time.

One wonders how much the Bruins’ decision to go with seven defensemen given Chara’s potential limitations helped them get things going offensively, too. Through 20 minutes, both Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak enjoyed multiple double-shift opportunities and ended up second on the team in TOI with seven minutes played apiece. They made a lot of hay in those minutes, but because they were playing with basically everyone.

Chara, for his part, played just 5:55 of not-great hockey, five seconds fewer than partner Charlie McAvoy, while the Krug-Carlo pairing became the big-minutes group. That decision worked out pretty well, too.

The problem for Boston was that Binnington finally ascended to the higher plane people have been saying he’s occupied for the last couple weeks. The Bruins totally ran the show but had nothing to show for it, owing to Binnington’s poise and a Marchand shot off the post.

And then it didn’t matter much. Because O’Reilly collected an awesome feed from Zach Sanford 55 seconds into the next period to make it 1-0 St. Louis. Play was a bit more even after that, tipping in St. Louis’s favor, and this certainly wasn’t the first time in the series an intermission talk resulted in a completely different team coming out of the dressing room for the next period.

Things settled down a bit after that — the Blues went a long stretch without even getting a shot on goal — but that was to their advantage because they slowed the game down and they were up a goal. The first period saw 35 shot attempts in 16 minutes of 5-on-5 hockey. The second saw just 25 in 18. Binnington this time wasn’t particularly troubled either, but he was good enough to keep the Bruins off the board.

Put another way, what looked like it could end up becoming ‘The Jordan Binnington Game’ quickly started to look like another ‘The Blues System Game.’ The number of second or third chances the Bruins were able to generate might not have been zero but it was awfully close to that. There were a couple of close calls, but Binnington stood tall when he needed to and the fact that the team in front of him generated almost nothing didn’t much matter.

Then, of course, was the appalling no-call when Bozak tripped Noel Acciari, clear as day, to the point where Bozak put his hands up like, “Yeah that’s on me.” And because this postseason has been one in which the refs made a total mess of everything, the series got its shouldn’t-have-been-a-major, shouldn’t-have-been-offside, should-have-been-a-hand-pass. In a one-goal Game 5 of a tied Stanley Cup Final.

And while Jake DeBrusk followed with a goal to halve the lead, and the Bruins pushed for the tying goal, they never really did much to threaten again.

It was another great game for Berube not only because the Blues played symphonic (if unaesthetic) team hockey. Not only because he put Sanford on the O’Reilly line — Sanford is up to three primary assists in as many games. Not only doing what was needed to get his boys to turn things around after an awful opening period. But also because the refs are so scared of him they’ll ignore the easiest call of the series so he won’t say mean stuff about them in the postgame presser again.

The Bruins are right to feel aggrieved in all this. The Blues are also right to not care how ugly the wins have been. They only need one more to win a Cup. Can’t ask for a whole lot more than that.

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference and Corsica unless noted.

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