Morning Skate: Milestone

Happy Tuesday, folks. American Thanksgiving is in sight. You’re almost there.

The Bruins gave you something to be thankful for last night, starting off their nine-game gauntlet with a 5-3 win over Tampa.

While it wasn’t a wire-to-wire performance (Tampa tilted the ice early on), it was one of those games where once the Bruins turned it on, the opposition couldn’t do much to slow them down.

Anyways, on to another group of Florida Men on Wednesday.

The big story from last night’s win was obviously the big milestone for Patrice Bergeron, as he became the fourth Bruin to record 1,000 points.

He also became the eighth current NHLer to have 1,000 points or more, and the Bruins got most of those other guys to say something nice about him on camera:

Eric Staal and Anze Kopitar having that many points kind of surprised me, but I guess it’s easy to forget how many monster years each had during the various primes of their careers.

(That includes a 100-point season for Staal in his second NHL season, plus a 92-point campaign for Kopitar in 2018).

The next one to keep an eye on will be Brad Marchand, who currently sits at 810.

Given how he has produced over the course of his career and the fact that he still should have several productive years left, he should break 1,000 before he hangs ‘em up.

Today’s discussion topic

We’ve given the Bruins plenty of kudos on the season thus far, but the New Jersey Devils won their 13th (!) game in a row last night.

I wouldn’t have marked a Bruins-Devils game in late December (Dec. 23 and 28, to be exact) as “must-see TV” before the season, but...here we are!