Scoring
One of the biggest reasons you have to worry about the Bruins is scoring. Boston has a lot of scoring and it is spread out enough to make it more difficult to defend.
In the regular season, the Bruins had three 30-plus goal scorers. They had four players with 70-plus points.
The Bruins had a 100 point scorer who also had close to 100 penalty minutes. We will get to that guy later.
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Patrice Bergeron had a huge bounce-back year with 79 points, coming off two seasons with of 53 and 63. He’s got eight goals and 13 points in Boston’s 17 games.
David Pastrnak is not just a funny commercial actor. At only 22 years old, he scored 38 goals and 81 points.
David Krejci – pronounced Kray-chee for the hockey novice – tied a career high with 73 points. Normally you do not rebound with career highs once you pass 30, but he did.
Making matters worse, this team is a power play dynamo. In the regular season, Boston scored almost 26% of the time when up a man. That’s over six percentage points better than the league average.
In the playoffs, they are scoring on 34% of their power play chances. That’s almost unheard of.
To put that into perspective, Tampa Bay had the best regular season power play in 2018-19 at 28.2%. It is apples to oranges like someone hitting .350 in the playoffs in baseball but being a .258 hitter in the regular season.
Nevetheless, it shows they get pucks to the net and crash on rebounds and make it all the more destructive for your team to take penalties. The Blues will need to be disciplined.
St. Louis has the defensive ability to keep Boston in check. They simply cannot afford to switch off though or they might get lit up with this crew.