Kalman: Don't Look Now But Bruins Within Sniffing Distance of First-Place Canadiens

BOSTON (CBS) -- After the Patriots defeated the Tennessee Titans on Sunday at Gillette Stadium, that venue ceased to be solely a football field and began its transformation to a hockey rink.

The 2016 NHL Winter Classic is less than two weeks away and the excitement should begin to increase at a rapid pace between now and New Year's Day.

A couple months ago, it looked the Bruins' Foxboro showdown with Montreal was going to be a battle of a first-place team and a last-place team. The Canadiens won their first nine games, while the Bruins started 0-3-0 and were 5-3-1 through nine games. When Boston lost in Montreal on Nov. 7, the Bruins' record was a mediocre 6-6-1.

Things have changed nearly 180 degrees since then. With one game left before the Christmas break, the Bruins, who defeated New Jersey 2-1 in a shootout Sunday night at TD Garden, are now one point behind Montreal for first place in the Atlantic Division with two games in hand.

They're so close to being a first-place team, everyone in New England can smell it. Or at least everyone with a sense of smell can tell how close the Bruins are to the top of the heap.

"I got a bad nose. I've had an operation on that thing and it doesn't work well for me," Bruins coach Claude Julien said. "But I like what I see. We'll make the most of it. We've got an opportunity on Tuesday to finish strong and more than anything else if we look at our game tonight and we look at the areas we could have been better at and focus on that, maybe we have a chance to win ourselves another game before Christmas and who knows?"

There's no doubt the Canadiens have helped the Bruins out along the way. Playing for much of the past couple months without injured star goaltender Carey Price and Brendan Gallagher, both of whom aren't expected to be back for the Classic, the Canadiens have won twice in their past 10 games (2-8-0). They dropped the opener of an eight-game stretch of road games on Saturday 6-2 to Dallas. Only the Christmas break will allow the Canadiens some home cooking over the next couple weeks, with the Classic serving as the seventh of the eight games.

But Montreal's malaise wouldn't mean much to the Bruins if they didn't turn things around in a big way. They've won three in a row and are 11-1-3 in their past 14. They're relatively happy, but most of all they're playing the game the right way, the way the coaching staff wants it to be played.

And the Bruins' faith in themselves and the system has paid off in multiple ways. They swept a home-and-home series with Pittsburgh by dominating a 3-0 win and then prevailing in a more open affair 6-2. On Sunday, they showed they could grind out two points by battling the Devils for 65 minutes and then getting the lone goal (by Ryan Spooner) in a shootout.

"It doesn't matter how you get it done, but we got two points so that's all that matters tonight," center David Krejci said.

Krejci and Spooner both agreed that a month or so ago, the thought of being so close to first place would've been close to a joke. It looked like wild card spot or bust for the Bruins. But then things began to turn. There was no magic potion that suddenly made a moribund bunch of Bruins in October morph into contenders. The Canadiens and the entire division (have you noticed how lame Tampa Bay is playing lately?) kept contention within reach and the Bruins began to grow up. Matt Beleskey, Colin Miller and Frank Vatrano have fit in as newcomers, Spooner has matured into a player Julien can trust more often and most of the veteran returning players have adapted to the faster pace the Bruins wanted to play with once they missed the playoffs last season.

"There's lots of things," Krejci said about reasons for the turnaround. "But obviously we got a new GM, we got some new faces so had to get used to the system, get used to each other. We had to create chemistry off the ice and then have it click on the ice as well. So it takes some time. So after like 10 games, I thought we were rolling pretty good. We were winning games. Even when we were losing games it was in overtime or we lose by one goal. So that's how you want to lose, by one goal or in overtime. I think we've got something good going, but we've got to keep it up."

If the Bruins keep it up, they could be the first-place team that takes the ice at the Winter Classic.

Matt Kalman covers the Bruins for CBSBoston.com and also contributes to NHL.com and several other media outlets. Follow him on Twitter @TheBruinsBlog.