Savard

The Boston Bruins defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-2, behind three-point nights by Marc Savard and Dennis Wideman in the first half of a home-and-home series tonight at Mellon Arena. You can read the game recap at Yahoo.

Here are my notes and thoughts:

•The Bruins’ power play had been 0 for its last 14 before Zdeno Chara lit the lamp on the man-advantage with 4:46 elapsed in the second period. (more…)

Thornton

Last week, Dave Caldwell of the New York Times detailed how fighting majors in the NHL are up 15 percent from last season and 75 percent over three years ago.

Oddly enough, the Boston Bruins — widely accepted as one of the toughest teams in the NHL — aren’t following that trend. Last season through Dec. 29, the Bruins had compiled 29 fighting majors, according to hockeyfights.com. The Bruins finished the regular season with 52 fighting majors. (more…)

The top two scorers in the NHL — Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby — will face one of their stiffest tests of the season against the top team in goals allowed, the Boston Bruins, tonight at Mellon Arena. The Bruins are allowing just 2.11 goals per game through their first 36 contests.

Malkin (15-44-59) and Crosby (15-34-49) have plenty of help though, including Jordan Staal (11-10-21), who tonight will become the youngest player ever to reach 200 games played in the NHL. Another historic note: Crosby will be skating in his 250th career game, and according to the Elias Sports Bureau his 114-229-343 points total is the sixth-most by a player in his first 250 outings. (more…)

Talbot

The Pittsburgh Penguins will be looking at their home-and-home series with the Boston Bruins, which starts tonight in Pittsburgh, as a perfect chance to start their climb toward the top of the Eastern Conference — where the Bruins, of course, currently reside.

Dave Molinari in today’s Post-Gazette reports that the Pittsburgh players aren’t blaming their head coach Michel Therrien or his staff for the club’s recent sluggish play. Molinari also writes about the Penguins’ good fortune when Maxime Talbot scores a goal. However, he hasn’t found the back of the net in 19 games.

Penguins forward Matt Cooke was on hand for Sunday’s Cleveland Browns-Pittsburgh Steelers game and he witnessed Ben Roethlisberger suffer a concussion. That prompted Rob Rossi to tackle the subject of head injuries in the Tribune-Review. Rossi also reports that former Bruins defenseman Hal Gill will be back in the Pittsburgh line-up after missing 10 games.

Fernandez

No. 4: One of the low points of the calendar year 2007 for the Boston Bruins was that their $4.5 million acquisition, Manny Fernandez, had to undergo season-ending knee surgery in December.

Acquired to give the Bruins the No. 1 netminder they’d always desired (but didn’t realize they already had in Tim Thomas), Fernandez became a non-factor in the franchise’s resurrection under new head coach Claude Julien.

But this story of disappointment turned to one of triumph in the second half of ’08 and Fernandez’s return to form and his combining with Thomas to give the Bruins the best goaltender tandem in the NHL earned its spot among the top 10 stories of the year. (more…)

Thomas

Among all the statistics that add up to explain why the Boston Bruins woke up this morning atop the Eastern Conference and neck and neck with San Jose for the most points in the entire NHL, one sticks out in my mind as the most astonishing: road winning percentage.

Through their first 21 road games, the Bruins have compiled a 14-4-3 record — a league-high .667 road win percentage. The fast start is a far cry from the away records the Bruins compiled last season (20-13-8) and the year before (17-22-2).

Goaltender Tim Thomas has been a major reason for the club’s ability to continually prevail away from Boston. He’s received the majority of the Bruins’ road starts (14) and compiled a 10-2-2 record with a 1.82 goals-against average, .940 save percentage and three shutouts. (more…)

Stajan

There are probably worse things than can happen to an NHL player during the course of a game, but when it comes to the time leading up to the opening faceoff there’s nothing more embarrassing or damaging than an injury suffered during pregame warm-ups.

Toronto Maple Leafs center Matt Stajan is the latest NHLer to suffer an injury during his club’s pregame soccer ritual. Leafs general manager Brian Burke confirmed to The Sun’s Steve Buffery that Stajan has a condition known as hyphema in his right eye as result of a soccer ball in the face. Stajan will be restricted in his activity for one to two weeks.

MK: This would be the worst nightmare for the Boston Bruins, who enjoy some raucous soccer exhibitions before their games both home and away. The team has had enough on-ice injuries already, so battling an off-ice one could be crushing. Of course, there’s no reason to ban soccer. Teams should just do a better job of instituting some guidelines and maybe have an assistant coach or trainer watch the games if players who have millions of dollars on the line won’t be a little bit smarter and in-control.

Fleury

While most eyes in the hockey world this week will be focused on Chicago and the 2009 Winter Classic at Wrigley Field, the most intriguing match-up this week could be the home-and-home series between the Boston Bruins and Pittsburgh Penguins.

The defending Eastern Conference champs host the East’s current top team Tuesday and then the scene shifts to Boston Thursday night. In today’s Post-Gazette, Dave Molinari tells us that the Penguins have been very impressed by the Bruins in the early season. And in the Tribune, Rob Rossi has goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury criticizing his team’s work ethic.

Ryder

The game-winning goals Boston Bruins winger Michael Ryder has scored this season haven’t always been that dramatic — what with the Bruins’ propensity for not playing tight games and just winning going away.

But this week, Ryder came up with two crucial goals to put the Bruins on their way to a pair of important road wins. For his two game-winning goals and a plus-3 rating in three games, Ryder is my Bruin of the Week for the week ending Dec. 28. (more…)

Kessel

No. 5: By all accounts, Phil Kessel had a solid sophomore season in the NHL leading into the Boston Bruins’ playoff series with Montreal.

As a rookie, he’d fought off testicular cancer and showed flashes of brilliance en route to 11 goals and 18 assists in 70 games. In his second season last winter, he skated in all 82 games and put up 19-18-37 totals. But after the Bruins were dominated in a 4-1 loss to the Habs in Game 1 in Montreal, head coach Claude Julien decided to shake things up — and his target was Kessel.

The then-20-year-old right winger was shipped up to the press box for Games 2, 3 and 4 — of which Boston won just one. What followed after a 1-0 Game 4 loss with the reinsertion of Kessel into the line-up is a story worthy of the top 10 of ’08. (more…)

Fernandez

Well, there’s only one downer in Manny Fernandez’s on-ice life right now, and that’s the lack of another match-up against Atlanta on the Boston Bruins’ remaining schedule.

With his 32-save performance at Philips Arena, Fernandez improved to 7-0-0 all-time against the Thrashers, including 3-0-0 this year. The win also improved Boston to 4-0 this year against the Thrashers.

•No one can accuse of winger Michael Ryder of bad timing. With his tie-breaking score at 13:56 of the third period, Ryder extended his league-leading total in the game-winning goals department. He now has seven — two more than the second-place skaters in that category.

•The Bruins are now 7-0-1 on the second night of back-to-back situations.

•Aaron Ward skated 14:30 of ice time in his return after missing 10 of the last 11 outings.

A season-series sweep is the offing tonight when the Boston Bruins visit the Atlanta Thrashers at Philips Arena.

The Bruins are 3-0 vs. Atlanta to this point of the season, and a pair of the club’s young guns are have been a major reason for Boston’s success against the team from Dixie. (more…)

Fresh off earning their seventh straight win — their longest winning streak in 15 years — the Boston Bruins are in Atlanta tonight to battle the Thrashers.

In today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mike Knobler takes a closer look at Bryan Little’s hot play.

Wheeler

No. 6: There were plenty of conventional unrestricted free agents set to become available last July 1, but the Boston Bruins’ first order of business was to ink one that hit the open market through a different route.

Forward Blake Wheeler, a three-year standout at the University of Minnesota, had made it clear that he was going to use a clause in the collective bargaining agreement to become a UFA July 1. From the time the spring semester ended until the week leading up to the 2008 NHL Entry Draft, numerous NHL general managers attempted to woo the 6-foot-5, 208-pound former first-round pick (fifth overall in 2004) of the Phoenix Coyotes. Wheeler’s picking of the Bruins made a big enough impact to earn a place among the top 10 Bruins stories of the calendar year 2008. (more…)

It looks like just as the Montreal Canadiens are ready to get winger Andrei Kostitsyn back in the line-up, captain Saku Koivu is going to be out for a stretch.

In today’s Montreal Gazette, Pat Hickey reports that Koivu did not depart with the Habs for the start of their four-game road trip and is unlikely to join the club before its stops in Pittsburgh, Florida, Tampa Bay and New Jersey are completed.

MK: The Habs got plenty of practice playing without Koivu last season and still hung on to the top spot in the East. But now their organizational depth is again going to be tested the way the Bruins’ has so often these last couple of seasons. It should be interesting to see if the Hamilton pipeline is as powerful as the Providence one.