When Tyler Seguin was traded to the Dallas Stars back on July 4th we all know the possibility and even likelihood that he would score 400 goals in the season and become the next Wane Gretzky. But frankly after what happened last night, the entire hockey world acts surprised.
Going into the Stars' Friday night game with Calgary, Tyler Seguin had scored 8 goals and 9 assists in 18 games played. Less than 3 hours later his score sheet barely looked recognizable. Tyler Seguin netted 4 goals on Friday night and without a doubt played the best game of his still fledgling career. He improved to a point where he is now an astounding 12 goal scorer and the 4th highest scorer in the entire NHL. Furthermore, the former Bruin winger has already eclipsed the scoring output of both his 1st and 3rd years in the league and however unlikely, it deserves mentioning that should he continue on this torrent goal scoring pace, Seguin will finish 2013-2014 with 52 goals. As a fan of the Boston Bruins, all I can do is relay the single exclamation that came to the minds of all of Bruins nation when they woke up this morning and read the morning paper. Ouch.
We look around this morning and think what if this kid was still in Boston? What if those 4 goals came during the Bruins mini slump last week? If so, would Seguin's presence have turned the Bruins into the 15 win team that even this early in the season they could be? No.
Like was said last July, Boston was never the place for Tyler. Here the team is centered around the framework that was laid in 2009 carried out when Boston won the cup in 2011 and intensify when 6 Boston Bruins netted 20 goals in their year of Cup defense that was 2012. This is the team that has seen just 3, 30 goal scorers in nearly a decade and for Tyler Seguin that kind of scoring distribution seemed to be off-putting. He always had this capability resting within him but like Hulk needed anger to trigger his violent power Tyler Seguin needed the Bruins to implement a kind of support they simply could not provide in order to allow him to bring home the goals.
This is the defining factor that distinguishes Seguin's 208 games in Boston from the 19 he has played in Dallas. He has been moved to center and told that HE is the most important part of his team. There are players who need this kind of its all about me mentality in order to succeed. Seguin and Kessel are two examples of this. Guys like Patrice Bergeron and Milan Lucic are examples of the opposite.
However, while Seguin's future in Boston was always a short one when you look into the Boston end of the Seguin trade and by extension the Kessel trade that gave the Bruins the pick the used to select Seguin everything seemed to have flipped from 1 year ago. At the end of last season, it seemed that with Seguin succeeding in Beantown and Kessel succeeding in Toronto the trade seemed even for both teams. Sadly though, once Seguin was shipped out of Boston this means that in a way, the Bruins traded Phil Kessel for a 28 year old Swedish winger: Loui Eriksson.
How does that sound?
To spit out a few more statistics, Bruin, Eriksson has scored 3 goals in Boston, 2 of which have gone in off his skate, while Kessel in Toronto has scored 10. Also, as you look towards Kessel's situation in Toronto and the one he went through in Boston, they unlike the case with Seguin are all but identical. From 06 to 08, the Bruins had no identity and therefore, Kessel was the big man on campus scoring 36 goals in 2008 all while playing the same position he plays today in Toronto.
Over the past 5 seasons, the ideas and outlooks on the Phil Kessell Trade that changed the future of the Bruins for the better has constantly changed. There was Seguin in Boston who came just 1 goal shy of 30 in 2012 and then Kessel who flipped the tides back in his favor with 3 straight 30 goal seasons in Toronto. Finally with Seguin gone and Loui Eriksson introduced it seems that the book has been closed, the hatched has been buried. Unless Loui Eriksson turns it around soon, the Bruins will not only have lost the Toronto trade but also the Dallas one.
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