Through 37 games, Boston has six other players with 27 points or more, including defenseman Hampus Lindholm, who’s chipped in with four goals and 23 assists from the blue line. Of course, Pastrnak isn’t the only player scoring for the Bruins. Suffice it to say that Pasta is having an MVP-caliber season (that is, if Connor McDavid didn’t exist). The Czech winger is on pace to break career highs for both goals and points - career highs that currently stand at 48 and 95, respectively. It also helps to have David Pastrnak, one of the NHL’s deadliest shooters and among its 10 best players, period. 926 save percentage - and the former is the current front-runner (at least according to Vegas) to win the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best netminder. Starter Linus Ullmark and backup Jeremy Swayman have combined for a league best.

So, why are the Bruins this good? For starters, they’ve got the current best goaltending tandem in the NHL. Boston isn’t unbeatable - but it’s as close to unbeatable as it gets. '> 5 And through their first 37 games the Bruins have lost on just eight occasions, and only four times in regulation. '> 4 and some of it without talismanic left winger Brad Marchand. 3 Boston did most of that without star defenseman Charlie McAvoy nursing a shoulder injury. The B’s set the record for the best home start in NHL history, winning their first 14 games at the TD Garden before finally dropping one - in OT, for what it’s worth - to the Vegas Golden Knights. Simply put, the Bruins are the best team in the NHL at the moment. They (comfortably) have the best Elo rating in the league they lead the league ( by a wide margin) in points percentage they’re scoring the second-most goals per game, but are giving up ( by far) the fewest goals per game they have a top-six power-play percentage and a league-leading penalty kill percentage and their SRS 2 is (comically, ridiculously, obscenely, ludicrously) nearly double that of the next best team. As things stand, the Bruins are far and away the best team in the NHL by just about every metric that matters. But here are the six storylines that have surprised us the most in the early stages of the season:Īt the beginning of the season, we thought the Bruins would be pretty good - we gave them a 77 percent chance of making the playoffs, and a 5 percent chance of winning the whole thing - but we couldn’t have predicted the ridiculous start they’ve had. '> 1 Some things about the season aren’t shocking at all, of course - like the tankfest currently unfolding to earn the draft rights to mega-prospect Connor Bedard. This year, that rate is down to 58.7 percent. our Elo forecast model won on average 62.3 percent of the time in 2021-22, the third-highest success rate for favored teams since 1989-90. That means it’s time to take stock of a season that has been decidedly less predictable than last year’s top-heavy campaign so far. The holidays are over, and so is roughly half of the NHL’s 2022-23 regular-season schedule. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DAN DAO / GETTY IMAGES

Bruins score from today