Boston Bruins at the end of an empire (Trending Topics)

When you think about the best possession teams in the league over the last several years, the Boston Bruins spring readily to mind.

They have two of the 10 best score-adjusted possession seasons seen since 2012-13. And even last year, while constituting a slight step back, ranked 37th out of 120, putting it in the same neighborhood as this year's performances from very good teams like Tampa or St. Louis. Having Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand and Loui Eriksson in the lineup for a lot of those games certainly goes a long way in this regard, even as a few of the other good possession players on the roster have been stripped away.

So it is quite troubling that there have only been a few stretches this year when the Bruins even peaked their heads up above the 50 percent mark, and entered Thursday's games sitting 19th in the league in score-adjusted possession, behind Edmonton and Philadelphia.

(They dipped under it again in Thursday night's win over the Chicago Blackhawks.)

Being just 48.5 percent in this regard is a serious issue, and a bigger issue here seems to be that the Bruins are simply trending in the wrong direction.

It is, again, understandable to some extent. The Bruins used to be a team with elite depth, even if they did often overpay for it. Now, the team has just six regulars on the roster (those with 500-plus minutes at 5-on-5) who carry positive possession numbers. You can probably guess three of them: Bergeron and Marchand are still godlike at more than 54 percent apiece, Eriksson is third at about 52.6 percent, while Brett Connolly has benefited from a lot of minutes with Boston's top-two, and Matt Beleskey is very marginally north of break-even. The only other guy to clear 50 is oft-scratched Colin Miller.

Meanwhile, David Krejci is very slightly below the water line, and it just gets worse from there. Let's put it this way: They're still using Zdeno Chara as their shutdown guy on defense for want of anyone better to handle those duties, and even he can't keep the puck in the attacking end any more. Okay, sure, he's 38 years old (39 in two weeks!), and he's been saddled with Zach Trotman and Kevan Miller for the bulk of his time this season, because the team has so systematically stripped away anything useful on the blue line that the wear and tear of being the most dominant defenseman of his generation are finally starting to show.

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All of which continues to drag the Bruins down deeper and deeper into this self-made hole. The once-titan of the East is now meekly battling it out with the Oilers and Blue Jackets to see which finishes in the bottom third of the league in terms of possession.

There is, of course, more to hockey than corsi-for percentage, but the Bruins aren't doing too well in other cases either. Their ability to generate more high-quality scoring chances than their opponents rivals that of the Calgary Flames, which is to say they get outchanced on a more or less nightly basis. They're also very slightly above water in terms of shots on goal, and in terms of actually putting the puck in the net, well, they're chugging along at 52 percent, good for 10th in the league.

The overall trend, though, is really, really bad.

In the past, you might have been able to say that kind of buoyed goal differential was the result of Tuukka Rask being one of the best goaltenders alive, and you'd have been right. The Bruins have routinely turned in some of the highest PDOs in the league, based almost entirely on their ability to rely on a goaltender keeping the puck out. But this year, the goaltending has been a little below average. (It's .922 at 5-on-5 overall, and Rask's .928 ranks pretty low among heavily-used starters, as well as being not-slightly under the .934 he posted over his career prior to this season).

In fact, they've been saved by shooting percentage. Their 8.4 percent shooting was fifth-highest in the league entering last night's games, tied with ottawa and behind only the Capitals, Rangers, Panthers, and Coyotes. Given the way this roster has been handled over the years, we can reasonably argue that this has nothing to do with talent level, and a lot more to do with luck. The Bruins' collective shooting percentage from 2007-08 to present (the Claude Julien years) across both the regular season and playoffs is 8 percent, and the team's current 8.4 percent is well within the range of variation you might expect over a 64-game burst.

Nonetheless, it's fueling the team's edge in goals-for (plus-10, tied for sixth in the league), and it's coming despite the fact that the team's most prolific shooters this season are actually a bit unlucky. Here are the team's 15 players with at least 500 minutes at full strength, and you see the results they're getting:

What's interesting is that Bergeron, Marchand, and Krug (ranked Nos. 1-3 on the team in 5-on-5 shots on goal) are the team's most prolific shooters and struggling to meet career norms for shooting percentage anyway. But other big-volume guys include Beleskey and Eriksson are coming out ahead of already well-above-average career numbers. You can also say that Colin Miller shooting 6.67 percent from the blue line, albeit in a limited number of games, isn't going to last forever, because most defenseman don't stay that high for a long time (see also: Chara's career 3.8 percent). That's what really helps keep the team afloat in terms of goals.

So, too, does a strong power play, which helps keep the Bruins in games they otherwise might not deserve to be in. They generate more shots per 60 minutes of power play time than the vast majority of the league, and consequently score a lot on it. But they also don't draw enough penalties (25th in the league in power play opportunities).

They've also taken the eighth-most penalties themselves. So while you can say they have a top-level man advantage (21.4 percent entered last night eighth in the league) and PK (82.2 percent is good for 11th), the fact remains that despite the quality of their special teams play, the net number of goals they've earned as a result is just a plus-2, which is only 14th in the NHL.

Adding Lee Stempniak at the deadline, a guy who regularly proves to be worth more than his contracts, should help this club, given that it's so starved for talent at the bottom of the lineup. But he's not enough to actually sort out this team's problems, because they are much deeper than all that. The defense's problems are well-documented, and they've generally been a bit of a possession black hole. Colin Miller is the team's only defenseman who has a better-than-50 possession number, and Adam McQuaid and Kevan Miller (no relation) continue to get reps instead despite much worse percentages.

Having traded Dougie Hamilton doesn't help (and hey, that's a trade the Bruins apparently regret now!) but the issue is deeper than that. Even if he were around, maybe he drags another player or two above water — he's been a positive relative possession player in Calgary after a slow start acclimating to a systems-free coaching style from Bob Hartley — but the basic problems with the team's total lack of depth still linger. Moreover, given the team's commitment to not-selling its useful players and entering a needed rebuild, they should continue to hang over proceedings for some time to come as well.

People complain about the Bruins' inability to beat good teams at home, but frankly all these numbers show they shouldn't be beating good teams anywhere, and should probably lose to some bad ones more often as well.

I'm not sure how you fix the problem, in and of itself.

Julien has proven a masterful manipulator of talented teams, but he's also done nothing in the last 20 or so games to straighten out the team's very obvious problems. One imagines it would be difficult for any coach to do so. Giving Patrice Bergeron more minutes than David Krejci might be a good jumping-off point, given that one is clearly elite and the other produces points but otherwise gets run over. Maybe you say Bergeron playing more would also curtail his effectiveness in comparison with how he's deployed now, and I think there might be something to that. But you've got to try something, right? Despite fewer minutes a night, he still leads the team in scoring, and using both he and Marchand on a more regular basis might be what you need to bring the team back toward breaking even in possession and chances, which in turn solidifies the foundation of the club's shot and goal differentials. Which is what really matters.

The Bruins are in serious decline and it doesn't appear as though there's a way to pull out of the tailspin as time goes on. Bergeron is 30 and not going to get better. If he and Chara was the engine that drove this team for years (a reasonable argument, to be sure) and Chara just runs out of gas as anyone at his age might, then what do you do? The Bergeron/Marchand unit will be your only extremely useful operator left, and that's a good way to have your team be exposed on a nightly basis. Even a goalie as talented as Rask might not be enough to save you.

In much the same way as Henrik Lundqvist's effectiveness is the only thing holding open the Rangers' window for winning a Stanley Cup, you might say Chara's is as well. And given the decline he's gone through this season, you might even argue that window is closed.

This team is still likely to make the playoffs, but how deep it goes should inform decisions this summer and beyond. It likewise should have already been apparent that this wasn't a team getting any farther than the second round in a best-case scenario. Which, who cares? More money in the Jacobs' pockets, but no one in that front office can actually think that Boston is in any way competitive, can they? Maybe they should have traded Eriksson at the deadline, and everyone else of worth for that matter.

Things in Boston have quickly gotten ugly, and there aren't any signs they'll turn around in the near or distant futures. The Bruins were once fantastic, but they seem to have bought into their own PR as much as any team in the league has in the last decade, which has made them worse as a consequence. This process started long before Don Sweeney took over the job, but he's exacerbated it and sped up the process.

A fair assumption is that we're watching the end of an empire, and Sweeney is the one holding the fiddle.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.

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