Boston Bruins: Power Forward Milan Lucic Personifies Team's Turnaround

Through the first dozen games of his fifth NHL season, Milan Lucic could not have logged a more contrary sets of six outings. The Boston Bruins winger and reigning top scorer from last year had but one point in the form of an assist leading up to an Oct. 20 home bout with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

On the other side of another showdown with Toronto, Lucic has charged up six goals and 10 points over the last six outings. That includes a pair of three-point performances at the expense of the Northeast Division leaders.

Maybe not so coincidentally, both Boston-Toronto confrontations have been no contest. In defiance of their spot in the standings, the Bruins have taken the first four points of the season series by a cumulative score of 13-2. Lucic has had a hand in slightly less than half of those 13 goals with six points.

In addition, when Lucic was arid for the first two weeks of action, the Bruins went 2-4-0, being outscored 13-9 (not counting the third goal that came in a shootout against Chicago). His only point in that span came amidst a 4-1 triumph over the Tampa Bay Lightning, and he was lucky just to have an even plus-minus rating.

Amidst his hot streak, in which he has elevated his rating to a plus-five, Boston is 3-3-0. More tellingly, the Bruins have outscored their adversaries, 23-15, in that time. Two of those goals against and none of those goals for have been empty-netters.

And again, Lucic has played a direct, tangible part in just a little less than half of those 23 goals. He has been on the ice for 11 of them.

More encouragingly, Lucic has flipped on his switch in recent weeks even without distributing a vast supply of biscuits or brawn. He registered 14 body checks over his first six games and has added another 14 in the last six.

After falling short on each of his first 12 shots on goal, he has more recently hit the net six times out of 14 bids for an accuracy rate of 42.9 percent. Overall, he leads the Bruins with a 23.1 shooting percentage.

On the counts of hitting both opposing bodies and opposing nets, he has proven to consistently balance his two humors after essentially bottoming out in an Oct. 18 confrontation with Carolina. Lucic not only went without a single registered shot that night, but rather spent the bulk of his energy throwing a season-high six checks.

Regrettably for himself and his team, he was one of many Bruins who doled out too much physicality and emotion at a time, leading to a penalty-induced meltdown en route to a 4-1 home loss. Between separate roughing and verbal misconduct infractions, Lucic alone had 12, or precisely one-sixth, of Boston’s 72 total penalty minutes.

The drive that made Lucic a kinetic force for the better part of the 2010-11 regular season and at least the last three rounds of the 2011 playoffs had been in nearly nonexistent supply after a short summer to replenish. And then, like a desert monsoon, it had returned in a counterproductive overload while the reigning champs dipped back to two games below the .500 mark.

Yet two nights later, with the unbeaten Maple Leafs in town, Lucic scored his first goal of the season and added another two shots. He assisted on two other strikes, including Chris Kelly’s eventual decider. And he tossed in one of Boston’s 18 hits as part of a 6-2 victory.

All that despite receiving a mere 11:11 worth of ice time, second-least on the team behind Shawn Thornton.

Over the ensuing five games, Lucic has used no fewer than 15 minutes of playing time to recompense his initial hibernation. So much so that his transcript after 12 games this year of 6-5-11 matches his output at the same point last year.

Assuming he suits up for the full breadth of the regular season schedule, Lucic is presently on pace to finish the season with 42 goals and 27 assists. That would eclipse the career high of 30 goals and 62 points he just set in 2010-11.

There were two reasons he did not maintain that pace in the goal department last year. One was a month-long stretch touching half of December and half of January when he only struck the mesh twice in 16 games. The other was a 10-game goal drought that curtained the regular season.

If Lucic can stave off any more cold spells like that, there is no reason why he shouldn’t finish securely in the 30-goal range. There is perhaps even less reason for that than there is for the Bruins to slide out of 2012 postseason contention.