Welcome to a new week, folks!
The Bruins had themselves a perfect 2-0-0 weekend, beating Anaheim on Friday night and Los Angeles on Saturday night.
They’ll practice today ahead of tomorrow’s game in Dallas against a Stars team coming off of back-to-back wins over the Colorado Avalanche and the Chicago Blackhawks.
The Stars are off to a relatively uninspiring 4-3-1 start to the season, but they’ll come around at some point and are always a tough ask on the road.
Hat trick hero
Providence continues to have a tough go of it in the AHL, but they beat the Hershey Bears 6-1 on Sunday in a game that featured another hat trick from Mikey Eyssimont.
That was the second hat trick in four games for Eyssimont, who is tied for the AHL lead in goals with seven.
Per the Providence Bruins, Eyssimont’s feat was the first hat trick by a Providence player since 1994, when Sergei Zholtok (R.I.P.) recorded a hat trick in a 5-5 tie.
Ryan Tattle also recorded his first AHL point (an assist) in that win.
Fan-friendly schedule?
There are all kinds of metrics, particularly in the NFL and in college football, around strength of schedule, where the relative quality of opponents is taken into account.
CSB recently emailed me a study of their own, ranking each NHL team’s schedule by how friendly it is to that team’s fans—and they found that the Bruins have the second-most fan-friendly schedule in the league this season.
(Ironically enough, this info landed in my inbox as I was complaining about the late West Coast starts).
While not exactly super scientific, the study used a few different criteria: weekend daytime starts, weekend home games, Saturday home games, and weekday daytime starts, of which the Bruins have very few.
Per their study, the B’s have the most weekend daytime starts (likely due to national TV slots), the most Saturday home games, and the fourth-most weekend home games.
If you’re interested in the study’s methodology:
Methodology: CSB scored all 32 teams’ 42 home games across five factors — weekend home games, Saturday home games, weekend daytime starts, weekend rivalry/division games, and weekday daytime starts (scored in reverse, since workday matinees shut out most fans). Each factor is scaled 0-100 across the league and averaged equally into the Fan-Friendly Schedule Score.
Basically, these figures come together to make the B’s a fan-friendly watch, per CSB, as opposed to a team that plays more weekend road games or more of those random weekday afternoon games that no one can really watch.
Now if only the league wanted to do something about needing 49 different streaming services to watch those games…
Cold morning in the Boston area, with hockey weather starting to creep in.
What’s on tap for today?
