Boston Bruins: Youth Explains These Nonstop, Nightly Scoring Outbursts

Never mind the notion that even their recent opponents with respectable records―the Ottawa Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs and Edmonton Oilers―are prone to tumbling back to their non-playoff status of recent years.

Never mind that the usually celestial Buffalo Sabres stopper Ryan Miller has been in an obvious psychological funk that continued in Saturday night’s 6-2 upshot.

The hot streak the Boston Bruins are continuing to foster simply does not last this long by accident. They are 5-0-0 on the month of November at the expense of a variety of teams, scoring a cumulative 30 goals in that span. Only one of those has been on an empty net and there have been no fewer than five on each individual night.

Of those 30 strikes, 22 have come in pairs less than three minutes apart. Of those 11 fruitful sugar rushes, eight have been bookended by goals coming within less than one minute.

And on six of those 11 occasions, Tyler Seguin has inserted either the first or second tally. Milan Lucic has supplied another four. Nathan Horton has bagged three, Brad Marchand two.

Of those frequent flamethrowers, Horton is the most mature at the age of 26. Lucic and Marchand are both 23 and will not hit a new age until sometime after the first round of the next playoffs. And Seguin will be 20 at the end of January.

In other words, Boston’s three youngest forwards are directly responsible for half of Boston’s 30 goals. Seguin alone has tallied seven of them for 23 percent of the output.

On top of that, Lucic, Marchand and Seguin have combined for 10 assists in the last five outings.

Over the past week, Horton has joined in for a three-game point streak with three goals and three helpers. Patrice Bergeron, who is eight weeks younger than Horton, has a 1-5-6 scoring transcript on the month, all of his helpers being set-ups for Seguin goals.

Only seven of the last 30 strikes have come off the stick of any Bruins exceeding 26 years of age, including two apiece by the 27-year-old Johnny Boychuk and Chris Kelly. At 31, Kelly is one of only two Boston forwards and five skaters above the age of 30.

Entering this season, with only two of the team’s presumptive regulars being new to the organization, the Bruins’ best bet for a Stanley Cup hangover antidote was their youth and any energy that might generate.

It took a month and 10 games for that injection, the plunger being Seguin, to kick in. Between an overload, overspill and overkill of championship festivities, various bouts of subpar focus, overconfidence and lack of self-assurance amounted to an acrid 3-7-0 record.

Seguin himself had 10 points through those first 10 games with four goals and six helpers. No surprise there, given his peerless youth and the fact that he had expended energy in only 13 of the 25 playoff games last season.

He has since doubled his bushel in half as many outings for an 11-9-20 transcript through 15 games. That’s as many goals and two points fewer than what he charged up in 74 appearances over the 2010-11 regular season.

More critically, Seguin has become pathologically prolific to the point where his teammates are clearly inspired to emulate his performance. That has, in part, helped him elevate his plus/minus to a league-best plus-14.

Last Saturday, after he had already made it 1-0 against the host Maple Leafs, Seguin augmented the lead to 2-0 at 0:34 of the second period. Off the ensuing draw, Lucic took a mere eight seconds to expand the pothole to 3-0.

When Seguin made it 4-0 and completed his hat trick, it took the 25-year-old David Krejci all of 14 seconds to snap his personal six-game goalless skid.

On the more recent Saturday versus Buffalo at TD Garden, Seguin broke a 1-1 tie with 13:29 gone after Marchand forced a turnover and handed things over to him. A mere 16 seconds later, Horton augmented the lead to 3-1.

After Seguin’s second strike of the game at 7:11 of the closing frame, Marchand took two minutes and 39 seconds to insert his third in the last two games.

As recently as 72 hours ago, the Bruins were one game below the .500 mark, but Seguin was on a 50-goal pace. Now Boston is one game above .500 and Seguin has elevated his pace to 60 strikes over the 82-game schedule.

Odds are the latter trend will cool off, if only to a negligible degree. But the former ought to pick up, especially with a reliable defense and goaltending brigade moving farther away from October.

And whenever Seguin―or Horton, Lucic or Marchand, for that matter―shakes up the opposing net, the odds of an equally impactful aftershock are decent, at the very least, for the Bruins are certifiably capable of feeding off that productive energy.

And when the time inevitably comes for tighter games, that knack for maxing out those flares of momentum just might make the difference in important 2-0, 2-1 or 3-2 triumphs.