Boston Bruins' Team Depth Fills in on Tyler Seguin's off Night

Top scorer Tyler Seguin and his 19 elders on the Boston Bruins have officially and finally demonstrated mutual aid at its finest.

Entering Tuesday night’s home bout with the New Jersey Devils, the Bruins were winless with a 0-3-0 record on the year when Seguin was barred from the scoresheet.

All three of those games―in which they scored a cumulative two goals―occurred in October, meaning they were a comparatively respectable 3-4-0 when he did extract a point in games preceding Halloween.

For the first time in six outings in the present month of November, Seguin was stifled by the obsessive-defensive Devils, who allotted him one shot on goal and blocked two other attempts. Seguin did not unleash a single puck in the third period.

In addition, while linemates Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand collaborated on a goal immediately off the opening third period draw, the rest of the top six―Nathan Horton, David Krejci and Milan Lucic―combined for zero points with a minus-one rating apiece.

Yet as a team, the Bruins cultivated four goals―twice what they had mustered in all three of Seguin’s three other scoreless outings combined―for a sweaty 4-3 triumph. And the better part of the scoring came from the lower echelon of the depth chart, permeated with off-and-on or consistently cold twigs.

Fourth-line center Gregory Campbell cultivated two assists, doubling his point total to four on the year. This coming after a completely barren 10-game start to his season.

The recipient of Campbell’s first homeward-bound feed, Chris Kelly, scored a refreshing equalizer with 5:08 to spare in the second period. That gave the third-line pivot goals in consecutive games for the first time since Games 3 and 4 of last year’s playoff series versus Montreal. And it helps him to splash a little more on a preceding three-game point-getting drought.

After the Devils promptly deleted the 2-1 lead granted by Marchand, who now has goals in three consecutive games after none in his previous nine, Campbell fed Jordan Caron. Caron, in turn, found Shawn Thornton, who buried his own rebound at 3:40 of the third to renew the lead.

Like Campbell, Thornton was pointless through his first 10 games, a run that saw the team go 3-7-0. And he was the last active Boston forward with no goals on the year. But he has now hatched that goose-egg and has three points in six ventures this month.

With the primary assist on Thornton’s strike, Caron now has three points in his last four outings after producing none in his first eight.

New Jersey persistently drew another knot at 6:56, but yet another Bruin who was invisible for all of October―Benoit Pouliot―nailed the eventual clincher with 3:01 left. That made for his second goal in three appearances after sitting Saturday’s game out as well as three of the previous five.

The two men credited for the clinching set-up: Pouliot’s fellow offseason import―Joe Corvo―and Rich Peverley.

Corvo had chipped in three assists in his first six games as a Bruin, then went another six with no contribution. But lately, he has charged up five helpers over the last four games.

Peverley was briefly a promising candidate to replace Mark Recchi as Bergeron and Marchand’s colleague, but was then stuck on a 3-1-4 scoring transcript for four straight games to round out October.

On the other side of giving way to Seguin on the top line, Peverley is now on a four-game production streak. And two groups of two games apiece have sandwiched a week-long stint on the injured reserve list.

In other words, through six team games in November, Peverley has run a pattern of two nights on the scoresheet, two nights on the sideline and back.

With or without him, Boston has won all six of those games without sparing the opposition so much as an overtime point.

And for the first time this season, without the direct input of Seguin, the Bruins fended off a feisty adversary and pole-vaulted the Devils, along with Montreal, Ottawa and Tampa Bay for the eighth spot in the Eastern Conference standings.

There was nothing of this sort when they submitted to the Colorado Avalanche, 1-0. Ditto when they let a discipline detonator blow away their chance for a comeback in a 4-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes. Ditto when their only goal in a 2-1 loss to the Canadiens was on Montreal’s Pyrrhic face-off win.

In those three games, Seguin charged up a cumulative 0-0-0 log. Meanwhile, Bergeron, Peverley, Corvo and Dennis Seidenberg combined for a 2-2-4 transcript in those 180 minutes of action.

Conversely, in 60 minutes Tuesday night, Seguin had the same empty container while 10 different Bruins combined for 4-7-11 totals.

Still need any more reasons to believe this team (emphasis on “team”) has restored order?