In the span of about a week, the Boston Bruins went from a team with a mediocre offence laden with stars who can make plays when they need to, to one with a stellar offence and a mediocre defense that could make plays when it had to. Since last Saturday the Bruins have scored 23 times and ridiculously 12 different Bruins have combined to score those goals. Through the years, 30 years has not been a good thing for a player. When Patrice Bergeron scored 30 goals in his second year in the league something was said to him because one year later his assists totals went up and his goals went down. A few years after that, Phil Kessel scored 30 goals and was immediately traded to Toronto.
If you cannot infer from those statistics, I will say it straight. Claude Jullian does not like selfish goal scorers and frankly, it reflects in the shockingly even distribution of goals on their team. But that does not work for most other teams in the league. Take the St Louis Blues for example...
Fact is, if it were not for a slight mid-season slow down by Alexander Steen than the above pie chart may be very different and even more heavily skewed in favor of the Blues top scorer. But still, without the combination of Alexander Steen, David Backes and Vladimir Tarasenko, the Blues would also be without 36% of their team scoreing. Though they may not be as imbalanced as say the Rick Nash era Blue Jackets, the Blues rely on a very constricted 3 man attack.
The Pittsburgh Penguins use a 2 man attack with even more success than the Blues...
Responsible for more of his teams scoreing than any other player in the leauge, Sidney Crosby and Chris Kunitz are great players that at the same time put their team in a rather worrisome place. With only one or two other legitimate scoreing threats if Crosby or Kunitz goes down or is lost to free agency, the Penguins could very rapidly go from being a contender to a pretender.
That almost happened to the Anaheim Ducks last season and yet, nothing changed...
The Ducks are a team that relies far to much on old talent like Corey Perry and Ryan Getzlaf. For the Chicago Blachawks however, there is nothing to complain about with Patrick Sharp and Patrick Kane...
But the crown jewel of them all is the distribution enjoyed by the Bruins...
There is no clear cut not scorer on this team. No Bruin is responsible for more than 15% percent of his teams goals and while many are responsible for at least 10% of those goals, you have to go through 8 different players before you get to a guy with a rather small slice of this goal scoreing pie in Carl Soderberg. You see, there are even more names on this list of Bruins scorers that are not even included in this chart. Beyond Johnny Boychuck the Bruins have 6 more players who have scored goals in 2013-2014 and that alone should prove how balanced this team is.
There is no way to describe it and frankly, it doesn't even work for most NHL teams but in Boston it does and when you are trying to defend them you are in for a treat because unlike any other team, they can and will come at you with 22 guys who can score goals.
