Boston Bruins: Top 5 Items on Their Holiday Wish List

They are the defending Stanley Cup champions, sitting on top of the Eastern Conference and even have a lengthier Christmastime respite than most of their NHL peers. Specifically, the Boston Bruins have only one game in the next eight nights, that being their final home date of the calendar year this Friday.

What more can they possibly ask for? Well, hey, if the Bruins were to submit a blank sheet for their holiday wish list, it would constitute sitting on their laurels.

Boston simply needs something new to ensure a satisfying follow-through on last year’s glory and to preserve the notion that another Cup could be coming in the near future, even if that’s not this season.

Opposing Goalie’s Numbers

For all we know, the solution to this could come naturally to a team that is currently brandishing the second-most productive offense in the NHL and arguably the deepest and most balanced of all. But for the moment anyway, the fact remains the Florida Panthers’ goaltender Jose Theodore and New York Rangers’ stopper Henrik Lundqvist are a couple of stingy nemeses to the Bruins.

Tim Thomas can certainly match that stinginess, but look at all of the goose-eggs Theodore and Lundqvist have still managed to lay on this franchise, particularly at the TD Garden.

And while Boston is more certifiable in the postseason, a best-of-seven encounter with the Panthers or Rangers could prove similar to when the Bruins can into Cam Ward and the Carolina Hurricanes in 2009.

Translation: Either one of those stoppers could steal a series. But with three meetings still to come with Florida and a whole four-game season series with the Rangers, the Bruins have time to alter the outlook in case this potentiality arises in April or May.

A First-Rate First Line

The status quo structure of his depth chart is so effective that the last thing head coach Claude Julien wants to do is disassemble any lines. Even so, the likes of starters Nathan Horton, David Krejci and Milan Lucic continue to do less than enough to justify their long-term togetherness.

Far removed from the injury-riddled, hangover-plagued month of October, Krejci is still in the plus/minus red.

Krejci’s only specimen of company happens to be Horton, who is a minus-one through 32 games, has sprinkled a sporadic three goals and four points this month and only three shots on net over his last four outings. Lucic’s overall stats are substantially more savory, but he too has had more than his share of pointless performances.

In the interest of Patrice Bergeron, Chris Kelly and their respective wingers, these three are likely going to be kept intact. The least they can do is get back to reiterating what they are capable of.

After all, especially in the depths of homestretch and postseason, Boston can only subsist so much on supplementary scoring from Kelly, Rich Peverley, Daniel Paille, etc.

More Tuukka Time

The assumption that Thomas is not tapering off anytime soon gets safer by the game day, but it cannot become foolproof until this season ends.

More often than not, the phrase “backup goalie” is as good as a misnomer, for it usually means “consensus benchwarmer.” But Tuukka Rask is too talented and the Bruins’ reckonable persona is too valuable for that.

Imagine if, sometime this coming postseason, Thomas is suddenly injured or even comes down with a bug that bars him from an important game? Or what if he has a night similar to Dec. 15 against Columbus, when he let in three goals in 40 minutes and gave way to Rask, whose third-period shutout effectively salvaged a win?

You see?

It’s fine to keep Thomas the No. 1 goalie, but Rask must not rust. Ideally, instead of receiving one-third of the workload as he is now, he could use something closer to two-fifths at the least.

A (Close-to) 40-Goal Scorer

In accordance with his heart and desire, top gun Tyler Seguin’s pace has fluctuated between the 50-goal range and the mid-30s, where it is right now.

Two long weeks removed from a well-publicized, team-issued suspension for one game, Seguin may be capitalizing on a second wind now. After mustering one assist and six shots on net in the first three games following that episode, he has more recently logged a cumulative 11 shots and a 1-2-3 line against Philadelphia and Montreal.

Hitting the 40-goal plateau is a little less likely now than it was at this time a month ago, but it’s still quite possible. And even if he brushes close to that, Seguin can still have the best goal-scoring campaign for an individual Bruin since Phil Kessel inserted 36 in 2008-09.

That, in turn, would not only make Boston look more reckonable in the present, it would set the tone for a radiant future built around the first piece of compensation for Kessel.

Continued Health

Due to injuries to the brain and other areas, towering defensive vertebra Chris Pronger will not be at the Philadelphia Flyers’ service for the rest of this season. Sizzling scorers Claude Giroux of the Flyers and Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins both have hazy short-term futures with their own concussion problems.

How much that affects the two Pennsylvania powerhouses remains to be seen, but if their seasons fall short of satisfactory, there will be one explicit culprit. Not an excuse, but a logical explanation.

If something comparable were to hit the Bruins, they do have the luxury of extra cap space to import one body’s worth of reinforcement. Other than that, especially after the trading deadline, they need to keep their ecosystem, or at least the upper echelon of it, exactly as it is now.