The Bruins went to Philadelphia on Thursday with a bad taste in their mouths. Tempers and emotions skyrocketed this week after the fallout from the Marc Savard-Matt Cooke incident on Sunday, the blown lead in an overtime loss to the woeful Maple Leafs on Tuesday and the news prior to Thursday's game that Savard was showing little improvement, making it unlikely that he will return to the ice this season. It seemed fair to wonder whether the Bruins were bracing for a freefall from the playoff picture.

Instead, they went into the Wachovia Center and put a 5-1 pasting on the Flyers (recap). Patrice Bergeron had a three-point night with a goal and two assists while Blake Wheeler, David Krecji and Marco Sturm each had a goal and an assist for Boston.

The Bruins are by no means a perfect team. They are dead last in the NHL in scoring and are prone to taking shifts and sometimes periods off, especially with leads against inferior opponents, such as the loss to the Leafs.

Still, the bottom of the NHL’s Eastern Conference is a crapshoot of teams with major problems. The Rangers, Tampa Bay and Atlanta suffer from talent shortfalls and the Canadiens are middling with up-and-down goaltending and a lack of firepower to overcome it.

The Flyers have talent up front with Jeff Carter and Mike Richards (sixth in the league in scoring) and decent players on the back end, most notably with Chris Pronger (12th in the league in goals against). But the loss of Ray Emery for the season left them with a deficiency between the pipes.

Therefore, even the pitiful Bruins offense can take advantage, a notion that was underscored on Thursday. Michael Leighton got the start for Philadelphia and let in four goals on 25 shots before being pulled for Brian Boucher near the end of the second period.

Emery wasn’t exactly exceptional, permitting 2.64 goals against in 29 games before his injury, but he was adequate enough to keep the Flyers in contention. Leighton may be able to do the same but it is going to be an adventure in Cheese Steak Land down the stretch.

So, let the grand, convoluted race between a plethora of mediocre teams vying for playoff positioning begin. Considering the flaws of each contender, it should be fun to watch.

Here is a Hat Trick of lessons from Thursday:

BERGERON IS RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE

With Savard gone for the foreseeable future and perhaps the rest of the season, Patrice Bergeron absolutely has to be the man for Boston. In two games since Cooke took away the Bruins’ best playmaker, Bergeron has lived up to that job description, and then some.

The center has five points in the last two games (two goals, three assists), as his pairing with Marco Sturm and Mark Recchi functionally has become the No. 1 line as opposed to the third line.

Bergeron leads the team in points (43) and he has carried Recchi and Sturm to the top of the list with him, as they are tied for second in points with 35 apiece.

Bergeron has been playing well all year but it is a touch ironic that the man who knows so much about coming back from concussions takes over the lead playmaker role for a guy dealing with the after effects of the very same injury. (Randy Jones will forever be booed in Boston, which probably goes for Cooke now, too.)

The two goals that broke Leighton and the Flyers’ backs were a direct result of smart skating and a quick stick by Bergeron. The Bruins had just given up a 1-0 lead early in the second period on a power play strike by Carter. In the next 10 minutes Bergeron took control.

He found Recchi rushing to the goal on the right wing and hit him with an on-the-tape feed that allowed the veteran to go high on Leighton to make it 2-1 at 4:37. Six minutes later, he was sniffing around the crease after a shot from Matt Hunwick on the point got tangled up with Sturm and Leighton and popped onto Bergeron’s stick for a quick putback that provided the type of goal separation that the Bruins do not see all that often.

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It is a shame that everything has to revolve back to the loss of Savard, because David Krejci has been playing much better hockey for the Bruins since the Olympic break. Between Bergeron, Savard and Krejci, Boston could have had as good a row of centers as any team in the league.

Instead, the Bruins are left to wonder what might have been. It has been that type of season. One player is up, the other is down. The members of the top line are never healthy at the same time or are virtually nonexistent. A player comes back from the rehab room and passes a teammate on his way in.

That has placed a greater premium on Krejci’s performance this year. So much was expected of him entering this season and, on the whole, he has not lived up to expectations.

On Thursday, though, the hustle and skill that he possesses was on the front shelf of the display case. The opening goal of the game came when Krejci won a puck battle on the half wall in the defensive zone and started a 3-on-2 rush that ended with him feeding Wheeler in front for a backhand winner.

Krejci’s own goal came on a play that the Bruins have been working on almost non-stop all year in practice. It is the “stand if front of the net and make opportunities” drill. Wheeler fed the puck to Ryder from the circle; Ryder redirected it to Krejci, who was camped in front of Leighton. The center stepped to his right, waited and buried it.

Something clicked for the Czech in the Olympics, where he was one of a handful of real standouts in the tournament. Perhaps the playoff vibe that is the stretch run may remind him of Olympic hockey. Or perhaps not.

But a Krejci on the rise would haul up the production of Wheeler and Ryder and provide a significant boost to the Bruins’ efforts to maintain a hold on a playoff spot.

STUART STANDS UP FOR THE BRUINS

The chirping in New England has been that the Big Bad Bruins have gone soft. Don Cherry more or less accused Milan Lucic of wimping out in a fight against Colton Orr last Thursday and Mike Milbury wondered why nobody stepped up after Savard went down.

The players probably do not read fan comments in the articles that the press writes about them, but they definitely hear about it when guys like Cherry and Milbury say something. They can deny the “softness” or the effect the words have in public, but it does affect the team psyche.

Yet the Bruins did get outhit by the Flyers 31-21 on Thursday and almost got doubled up in the hit department against the Leafs on Tuesday. Somebody had to do something about the Bruins’ image problem before the rest of the league figured it could walk all over them.

That somebody turned out to be defenseman Mark Stuart. Stuart has come along this year as a better defender and an emerging leader. He took it upon himself in Philadelphia to get the attention of his teammates and the Flyers.

He dropped the gloves with Daniel Carcillo in the first period and then went toe-to-toe with Ian Laperriere in the second. He scored the winning knockdown in each fight as well.

One night of fisticuffs does not a tough team make, but clearly somebody on the team wanted to make an effort to silence the suggestion that the team has gone soft.