BUFFALOTyler Seguin is no longer leading the Bruins in goals scored, and he knows all about it.
Both Milan Lucic and Brad Marchand passed Seguin in Tuesday nights 4-2 win over the St. Louis Blues and now sit atop the Bs stat sheets with 21 goals each. The flurry of scoring for Lucic and Marchand ends a season-long stranglehold for Seguin at the top spot and underscores an offensive power outage thats coincided right along with the rest of the Bruins.
Seguin has four points (one goal and three assists) along with a minus-2 in 10 games during February, and its been seven games since he last scored a goal.
Now that hes watched his partner-in-crime, Marchand, get off his goal-scoring slump, Seguin is seeking his own offensive breakthrough. The Bruins will need Seguin if they hope to keep rolling and build on an encouraging two points against an upper-echelon Western Conference team (the Blues).
Hopefully we can put a few wins in a row here rather than back-and-forth with wins and losses, and the flip-flopping, said Seguin. The last few days weve been having fun with our jobs. Lately it hadnt been too much fun with way too much negative energy . . . myself included.
Why all the negative energy?
For Seguin it centered largely on A) his one goal since having the weekend of his life at the NHL All-Star game in Ottawa and B) the team scuffling with an 8-9-1 record over their last 19 games.
Its a credit to the second-year forward that hes still creating offensive chances despite the shots failing to fall for him. Seguins long stretch pass and ice vision made Marchands second goal possible against the Blues, and now the assist man is looking for the Nose Face Killah to return the favor against the Sabres.
I dont know. I wouldnt mind going through all his goals and finding out which ones I have the first assist on them, said Seguin with a smile. His first NHL hat trick was me just waiting around to feed it to him there at the end. He was calling for it against St. Louis and I could have given it to Patrice Bergeron or just taken it for myself. But I gave it to him for the goal.
I told Marchand, Youve got that monkey off your back.' So now its his turn to get the monkey off my back.
Theres one thing that both Seguin the individual and the Bruins team have figured out: its quality over quantity with the shots on net. During his drought, Seguin was simply trying to fire as many shots on net as possible. But hes taking a little more care to create quality chances in the last handful of games.
Seguins newfound patience, along with the ability to set up scoring chances for his linemates, demonstrates his maturation process. Still, an offensive tear by Seguin could go a long way
toward making up for the absences of Nathan Horton and Rich Peverley.
He went from six shots on net against the Wild on Sunday to zero against the Blues, so theres got to be a happy medium.
Watching the Blues game over, I thought Seguin competed well and worked hard," said coach Claude Julien. "There were really no shortcuts in his game. At one point you look at his line, and the line is performing. You can look at the line and say there are no goals scored for Seguin, but he was certainly participating in the scoring. Im sure hed like to score and Id like to see him score, but youve got to look at what hes giving on given nights.
There are times when you say we need to pucks on net, but you dont want to waste shots for the sake of feeling good on the stat sheet with shots on net. If the shots are all from the perimeter, then who cares? People might gauge it by the stat sheet, but the people that are really watching the game will gauge it by the quality of shots.
Team wins are the most important stat of all, of course, but Seguin's goal scoring clearly helps the Ws pile up For Boston. So its time for Seguin to step up his scoring efforts with the rest of the Bs top six forwards right now.