Better luck next year: The Boston Bruins are missing the most important piece

It is a huge weakness that needs to be addressed ... but it will not be easy.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Boston Bruins.

We are going to start here with a list of players.

This might seem like a random, arbitrary list of past and present players but it does relate to my point here with the 2023-24 Boston Bruins (and beyond).

The list: Jack Eichel, Nathan MacKinnon, Steven Stamkos, Ryan O’Reilly, Nicklas Backstrom, Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews, Anze Kopitar, Patrice Bergeron, Pavel Datsyuk, Ryan Getzlaf, Eric Staal.

What is the common denominator with all of those guys?

They were the No. 1 centers on every Stanley Cup winning team in the salary cap era (Crosby, Stamkos, Toews, and Kopitar all won multiple times).

With the possible exception of O’Reilly, every single one of those players was an elite, dominant, top-tier scorer in the NHL that could not only generate offense, but also help control the pace of play. And even though O’Reilly wasn’t somebody that was going to compete for scoring titles, he was still close to a point-per-game player and one of the best defensive players in the league. He was a legitimate, bonafide No. 1 center for them.

Let’s look at it strictly from a numbers perspective. Using that same list of players above let’s look at where they ranked league-wide in terms of points-per-game in the season each of them won the Cup.

2022-23: Eichel (Vegas) — 41st
2021-22: MacKinnon (Colorado) — 7th
2020-21: Stamkos (Tampa Bay) — 33rd
2019-20: Stamkos (Tampa Bay) — 11th
2018-19: O’Reilly (St. Louis) — 43rd
2017-18: Backstrom (Washington) — 47th (Evgeny Kuznetsov was also 16th this season)
2016-17: Crosby (Pittsburgh) — 2nd
2015-16: Crosby (Pittsburgh) — 4th
2014-15: Toews (Chicago) — 33rd
2013-14: Kopitar (Los Angeles) — 28th
2012-13: Toews (Chicago) — 12th
2011-12: Kopitar (Los Angeles) — 23rd
2010-11: Bergeron (Boston) — 77th (David Krejci was also 46th this season)
2009-10: Toews (Chicago) — 28th
2008-09: Crosby (Pittsburgh) — 3rd
2007-08: Datsyuk (Detroit) — 8th
2006-07: Getzlaf (Anaheim) — 110th (Andy McDonald was also 39th this season)
2005-06: Staal (Carolina) — 10th

Almost every player here is, at a minimum, within the top-40 offensively league-wide, and in the rare occasion that one of them was not (Backstrom in 2017-18, Bergeron in 2010-11, Getzlaf in 2006-07) there was a second-line center that WAS providing top-40 (or better) offense.

Several of these teams had two centers performing at that level.

They also mostly maintained that same level of scoring throughout the playoffs.

Now, let’s take a look at the 2023-24 Bruins centers and how they did offensively.

Pavel Zacha — 103rd
Charlie Coyle — 110th
Morgan Geekie — 209th
John Beecher — 531st

That’s not going to cut it from one of the most important positions on the ice. If you are not going to score at an elite rate, you at least better be like O’Reilly or Bergeron and play Selke-level defense. The Bruins received none of that.

The retirements of Bergeron and Krejci before the 2023-24 season left a massive hole down the middle of their lineup, and they never really did anything to address it.

They had enough talent and depth (and goaltending) elsewhere on the roster to get through an 82-game season, but when it came to the playoffs and getting through an elite team like Florida the flaw was very much exposed. Zacha and Coyle combined for just two goals and 11 total points in the 13 playoff games and were non-factors against the Panthers.

This is the biggest issue on the Bruins roster that is going to keep them from getting another Stanley Cup, and it has to be addressed. Doing so is going to be a challenge.

Let’s talk about it.