Tonight the Bruins return home from a three game road trip to face the San Jose Sharks. After putting up an impressive 36 shots (12 per period) and outscoring the Sabres 4-0, do the Bruins finally have their offense figured out?
After previously blogging about how you can't score if you don't shoot, I was pretty impressed with Saturday night's showing. Of course since the Sabres aren't really world beaters, we will need to see more offense tonight to start believing that they are out of their funk.
As a hockey fan and former field hockey player, there were three things that I saw on Saturday that make me think we are trending in the right direction.
Soft Hands- Watching the Bruins receive passes Saturday night, I was finally seeing them gain control of the puck immediately instead of having to corral it after it ricocheted off their stick. If you think back to last year's playoffs, Lucic had some serious hands of steal. To start this season, I felt the whole team had caught that disease. Hopefully, we see good initial puck control from here on out.
As a hockey fan and former field hockey player, there were three things that I saw on Saturday that make me think we are trending in the right direction.
Soft Hands- Watching the Bruins receive passes Saturday night, I was finally seeing them gain control of the puck immediately instead of having to corral it after it ricocheted off their stick. If you think back to last year's playoffs, Lucic had some serious hands of steal. To start this season, I felt the whole team had caught that disease. Hopefully, we see good initial puck control from here on out.
Ready to Shoot- Against the Sabres everyone appeared like they were both looking to shoot and ready to shoot when they received the puck. In previous games it looked like nobody wanted to shoot the puck and that my friends is real easy to defend.
Shooting Angles- This observation goes hand in hand with being ready to shoot. In earlier games we had maybe one player at the blue line ready to shoot with everyone else too close to the corners to have any net to work with. Against Buffalo we didn't get sucked in as deep which gave us three players with good shooting angles and two guys ready to run interference or get a tip in.
While those are my big three observations which I hope to see more of, I also liked seeing us try to block the goalies view with a moving target instead of just having Chara stand there. Of course it now means someone has to be in line with a Chara bullet from the blue line. I guess that's why they get the big bucks.
Shooting Angles- This observation goes hand in hand with being ready to shoot. In earlier games we had maybe one player at the blue line ready to shoot with everyone else too close to the corners to have any net to work with. Against Buffalo we didn't get sucked in as deep which gave us three players with good shooting angles and two guys ready to run interference or get a tip in.
While those are my big three observations which I hope to see more of, I also liked seeing us try to block the goalies view with a moving target instead of just having Chara stand there. Of course it now means someone has to be in line with a Chara bullet from the blue line. I guess that's why they get the big bucks.
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