Archive for the ‘Boston Bruins’ Category

It takes a lot more than goal scoring to win a hockey game. Well, that’s not entirely correct, but it takes a lot more than finishing ability to win a hockey game, and the only stats that appear in a boxscore that are to be trusted are goals and assists.

Patrice Bergeron is good at those things, but he’s also good at all the other things that aren’t recorded in the traditional boxscore, the things you could, until about six years ago, only really see with your eyes. Patience in the neutral zone and impatience in the defensive zone, Bergeron doesn’t like to play too many seconds on the ice without the puck on his stick, and that’s a damn good thing, because there aren’t many players better in the game with the puck on their stick.

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I’d be willing to bet that if Milan Lucic were hitting fewer players this season rather than more, that may be talked about a little more. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to test that hypothesis since there doesn’t exist a parallel universe.

If you’ve missed it, Milan Lucic hasn’t been scoring much this season and he may be sat out for tonight’s game. He has just six goals in 41 games played this season—on pace for just 12 over 82 games, obviously, compared to 20.6 goals per 82 games over the rest of the games in his career. Despite this… he’s hitting more. Lucic has 2.98 “hits per game” in 2013 compared to 2.48 in 2012 and 2.11 in 2011. I don’t place any stock in the NHL’s real-time statistics, and they’re almost only ever used to confirm a hypothesis and ignored otherwise.

But still, since I asked the question… why is Milan Lucic scoring fewer goals this season?

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