Couple of game recaps; Numbas

and Savard makes three...

Well, the Saturday game kinda sucked from a caring-about-the-bruins-winning perspective. However, Savard got a good goal and had a couple breakaways that he turned into drop-passes.

5-2, Arniel was the other Boston scorer. Whatever. The Bruins vets looked good, Thomas needs to shake off some rest, and Chara is an important part of our defense. Other than that, not much was going on.

The Bruins also beat the Habs in Quebec City in front of 40 of Patrice Bergeron's closest friends on Sunday (and they didn't even have to wear those puke-green shirts!).

And then Chemmy over on PensionPlanPuppets pointed out to me that Phil Kessel scored 13% of the Bruins' goals last year, and hahaha how did I feel about that, chump?

So here's my response:

Kessel was the highest-goal-scorer for the Bruins, yes. However, the second through twelfth player in goals scored are still there. Sorting the table by points, he’s the only one in the top ten missing.

We’ve lost 0 Short-handed goals, and 8 powerplay goals. Ryder, Savard, Wideman, and Chara all had more powerplay goals than Kessel.

Leaving him with 28 ESG last year. 6 other bruins had more than half that: Wheeler, Kobasew, Krejci, Lucic, Savard, Ryder. All of them are staying. Of course, none of them have over 10 percent of the Bruins even-strength scoring.

However, I think Ryder-Savard will be a good matchup, and if Sturm can stay healthy (every finger and toe on my body is crossed on this one) then we won’t be missing out too much.
Plus we’ll have Tuukka to push Thomas to be as good a goalie as possible, that will help on the other end of things. I think that puts the Bruins in contention for another Jennings trophy, which was a huge help last year.

Even without 36 goals, the Bruins would be 238-196, or up 42 goals over the season. The only teams with 42 more goals for than goals against last year were Detroit, San Jose, and Chicago. 42 is still good enough for best GF-GA in the whole Eastern Conference.

One more thing to look at: Assuming Kessel (whose production drops 40% when he's not with Savard) scores 36 goals again this year, that leaves Toronto with a -7 goal differential, still nearly 50 less than the Bruins'.

Eat it, Toronto.
GO BRUINS!