Why the Bruins deserve a little skepticism

Coming into the season, most people would have put the Boston Bruins somewhere in the league’s top five teams.

They looked great last year with a combination of a lethal top line, a lot of good to very good young players, strong goaltending, and what seemed to be an astute new coach who kept the team humming along at a high quality even after Claude Julien was fired midway through the previous season.

In most statistical categories, the Bruins looked great for 2017-18. Sixth in goals, third in goals against, fourth on the power play, third in killing penalties, and all with a normal, repeatable PDO of 100.2, and every underlying number at 5-on-5 ranged between solid and great. The fact that they lost in the second round of the playoffs seemed to be a quirk of playing in a division with both Tampa and Toronto than the fact that the depth scoring dried up.

The season-long performance shed a lot of doubts, both internally and externally, that this team was headed for a rebuild a couple years down the road. Which is why the team seemingly didn’t want to make a lot of changes this summer. They brought in Jaro Halak to shore up the goaltending depth (more on that in a second here) and added John Moore on a weirdly long deal, but other than that really didn’t do much more than replace what they lost in free agency with Tim Schaller and Riley Nash taking better offers elsewhere.

You couldn’t blame them. Even as the Leafs added John Tavares and Tampa stood pat with arguably the best roster in the game, Boston didn’t have a ton of wiggle room against the cap, certainly not to add the kind of difference-maker that would have catapulted them from “solidly top-five” to “solidly top-three,” and even with a good add, bumping out one of Tampa, Winnipeg, or Nashville would have been hard at that time.

(Winnipeg, obviously struggling out of the gate less in the standings than in terms of their quality of play, can be replaced by slow-starting-but-great San Jose without too much difficulty for the time being.)

You can see in the headline above that this is about where the Bruins stand and how I’m less convinced than I was a month ago that they’re also a top-five team anymore. So let’s talk about that: They entered last night’s slate of games (though they had the night off) tied for second in the East, even with Toronto and a point behind Tampa, which has a game in hand. That sounds just about right, lumping those three teams together atop the conference.

But Pittsburgh has two fewer games played and two fewer points to go with it, and both Montreal and Buffalo are, surprisingly, a couple of points back. It’s not as though the Bruins aren’t winning, because they obviously are, but there are some cracks in the facade that have given me a bit of pause.

First, again, even in winning three of the last four, they’ve also only won three of the last seven, with two OT losses mixed in. A good chunk of those games were on the road, including the 3-2 win over a good Carolina team the night before Halloween. And that with a fairly banged-up D corps. Charlie McAvoy, Kevan Miller, and Matt Grzelcyk have all missed some time of late, and McAvoy is obviously the best defender on the team. Forward David Backes, who is at this point providing dubious value to say the least, has also missed the past week and a half or so.

But where there’s cause for concern, for me anyway, comes on two fronts. The first issue here was probably the main culprit in the Bruins getting punted out of the playoffs last year. The total number of goals scored by non-first-line forwards in a 12-game postseason run last spring was just 20. Pastrnak and Bergeron had six each, while Marchand had four, for a total of 16.

The problem for the Bruins’ depth forwards is much the same this season. Through 12 games, the top line has combined for 22 goals, while the rest of the team’s forwards have 11. The No. 4 goalscorer on the team right now is…………. Zdeno Chara? The Bergeron line is basically recession-proof, but these other guys need to step it up. Whether they can is a different matter.

The second-line-and-below forwards are currently shooting just 7 percent in all situations and that probably won’t last. But if you look at this collection of names, one can’t exactly be hopeful that they’re all collectively going to figure it out and start scoring like crazy again. I think it’s fair to say a lot of the young guys haven’t taken the step many of us expected.

Especially because their underlying numbers with the big guns off the ice are, at the best of times, uninspiring and much more dismal than that at the worst of them, having only been really propped up by good goaltending (.950 with all three of Bergeron, Marchand and Pastrnak off) and a good job, as a team, limiting high-danger chances.

Which puts more pressure on the Bergeron line, but also the goaltenders. Tuukka Rask had another rough October (.902, following up last season’s .896) and should bounce back, but he’s not exactly All-World Tuukka Rask anymore, and is instead merely Roughly Average But Maybe A Little Better Tuukka Rask. That thins out your results, even if you think Halak’s going to eventually overtake Rask as the team’s No. 1; he’s .946 in seven appearances and coming off one down year on a putrid Islanders team, but the last time he was substantially above league average was 2015-16, and even then he only made 36 starts.

Again, I still think this is a good team, but it’s a good team with some really obvious flaws that could bump it down the pecking order over the course of a season. Certainly something to keep an eye on.

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.