One of the best hangs it up and the door for the Buffalo Sabres and others to ascend opens wide
Players like Patrice Bergeron are the kind of prize teams thank their lucky stars and their scouting staffs alike for landing years and years after the fact and for good reason.
The Boston Bruins had a No. 1 center for nearly two decades and he wasn’t even the No. 1 guy when he stepped into the lineup at 18 years old. Joe Thornton was the man then and Bergeron got to slip into the lineup almost immediately after he was the 45th overall pick in the 2003 draft.
Bergeron lost games to concussions early in his career but rebounded to become the best defensive forward in the game, a six-time Selke Award winner (2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2022, 2023) and helped the Bruins win the Stanley Cup in 2011 and two other finals trips in 2013 and 2019.
This will be the first time since 2003 Bergeron won’t be in the Bruins lineup and his absence creates a chasm up the middle for them, particularly since David Krejci is looking like he’s not coming back either. Boston may go from having steady, fantastic production and defense at center to having Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha being the one-two punch up the middle. They’re good players and you can’t replace guys like Bergeron, but the question marks left behind are enormous and what was already a fraught and anxious offseason for Boston gets that much scarier for last year’s Presidents’ Trophy winners.
One team’s sadness is another’s reason to be encouraged and everyone else in the Atlantic Division is ready to fill the potential power vacuum within. But the timing of this (along with all of Boston’s lineup turnover) with Buffalo’s rise couldn’t be better.
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I went through Natural Stat Trick to look at the fancy stat ways Bergeron owned the Sabres the past two seasons at 5-on-5. The past two seasons because they’re the most relative to the current roster and, listen, looking at how he’s dominated them since the start of his career going back over how much exactly he was able to make the Sabres miserable felt like a redundant exercise.
What’s wild about looking back at the past two seasons of games against Buffalo (eight in total) is how easy he made it look and how he was matched up often against the Sabres’ best possession players and how he was able to make the most talented players look very average.
Of the eight games Bergeron played against Buffalo the past two seasons, only once he had a sub-50 percent CorsiFor at 5-on-5 and that came in the Bruins’ 7-0 win in Buffalo on March 19, 2023. He had a 46.7 CF% but still had 55.2 percent expected goals for. Only one other time did he have an xGF% lower than that (53.2 on April 28, 2022). In the other six games against the Sabres he had a xGF% of 65 or better. Keep in mind, the Sabres the past two seasons weren’t bad, but Bergeron made them (and many other teams) look like a pee-wee squad when he was on the ice. A true marvel.
But he’s gone and so is David Krejci (barring a sudden change of heart) which puts Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha into competition for the No. 1 and No. 2 center jobs with Morgan Geekie, and Patrick Brown. If 2019 first rounder John Beecher was going to have a breakout season and take the NHL by storm, now would absolutely be the time to do it as far as the B’s are concerned.
I’m going off the rails here, but during the past two seasons Bergeron saw most of his ice time against these eight players and how they stacked up in regard to 5-on-5 CF% and xGF%
Rasmus Dahlin 42:07 67.1 85.03
Tage Thompson 33:46 59.7 72.9
Jeff Skinner 28:03 57.8 58.4
Owen Power 26:16 51.1 54.4
Alex Tuch 24:48 57.1 66.8
Kyle Okposo 24:22 61.2 73.9
Henri Jokiharju 22:58 58.3 56.9
Zemgus Girgensons 18:09 59.2 80.01
Abject dominance.
Yes, the Bruins have been one of the best teams in the league the past two seasons and the Sabres weren’t as good two years ago as they were last season…but still.
Using those same eight players, however, let’s look at how they stacked up against Coyle and Zacha. There are other factors that will make a difference here: time on ice will create small sample sizes in some cases and the defensemen those players played with will often be different than who Bergeron was on ice with most of the time. Add in situational factors as well and there’s enough to cast a lot of suspicion on the results, but it’s what we’ve got to work with here so we’re going with it.
(Numbers listed are 5-on-5 TOI vs., CF%, xGF%)
Charlie Coyle against:
Dahlin: 32:10 57.7 66.9
Thompson: 20:40 54.6 61.9
Skinner: 26:22 40.0 58.8
Power: 27:13 47.1 73.3
Tuch: 12:57 43.5 50.7
Okposo: 18:07 45.7 69.1
Jokiharju: 25:58 50.0 71.6
Girgensons: 20:28 50.0 64.4
Over the past two years, Coyle’s most common forward teammates have been Trent Frederic, Craig Smith, and Taylor Hall. He was pretty clearly their third line center and those minutes bear that out.
These numbers aren’t as dominant as Bergeron’s, but these are also really damned good for Boston and not-so much Buffalo. How these numbers change with a shift in how Coyle is deployed and when and where he’s used situationally will be fascinating. It will be a massive step up in responsibility and a sizable increase in ice time in general.
When it comes to Zacha, the past two years had him playing for a subpar New Jersey Devils team and last season’s regular season behemoth Bruins. It’s a little unfair to measure his results with New Jersey with those he had with Boston (see them here), but they’re not too dissimilar which points to both of them being small sample sizes of their own. Seven or eight total minutes against a player over the course of three or four games in a season isn’t really going to tell us anything apart from how a handful of shifts went.
There have been times in the past when I’ve gone through the numbers and tried to play a prognosticator of sorts to get a feel for what may happen and what I’ve learned through that is it winds up looking really funny later on because what we’ve seen in the past doesn’t usually play itself out in the future. That’s why I’m kind of happy there wasn’t a ton to glean from this exercise aside from seeing how great Patrice Bergeron the past couple seasons against Buffalo was and how Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha were less so.
“No shit, Sherlock,” you say. I know, I know…but as much as everyone in the Eastern Conference are eager to find out what they can take away from the Bruins and the Sabres and others within the division are drooling at the possibility the Bruins may come crashing back to the pack…it may not play out like that at all. The Bruins have been one of those teams that no matter how many times you think they’re about to be dead and buried, they just don’t go away and sometimes they get even better.
It may be difficult for Buffalo to have a repeat performance offensively next season, but if it stays the same or even digresses a little bit, that’s still a ton of goals and if the Bruins do come back to the pack, it’ll create a massive swing in the playoff races and that’s something that didn’t seem very likely at all the past few seasons.