After a sleepy first period from the Bruins Tuesday night, Kevin Shattenkirk opened the scoring early in the second when he took a shot from the point that beat Spencer Martin through traffic. Shattenkirk is making $1.05 million this season.
Trent Frederic is playing the best hockey of his career
After the Columbus Blue Jackets tied the game, James van Riemsdyk got the lead back for Boston when he scored on a double deflection on the power play. Van Riemsdyk is making $1 million this season.
In the third period, Danton Heinen extended the lead to 3-1 when he buried a rebound off a van Riemsdyk shot. Heinen is making the league minimum $775,000 this season.
Heinen and van Riemsdyk helped finalize the 4-1 scoreline and the Bruins' fourth straight win later in the third, with Heinen getting the puck out of the defensive zone and van Riemsdyk making a nice pass to set up goal-scorer Trent Frederic.
General manager Don Sweeney had to have been smiling. These are the bargain-bin signings he was widely mocked for over the summer. Almost halfway through the season, it’s looking like Sweeney did about as well as anyone could have reasonably expected given the Bruins’ cap situation.
This wasn’t a one-off night for this group of cheap veterans. With three points total on Tuesday, van Riemsdyk now has 25 points in 34 games this season, which ranks fourth on the team. He is tied for second on the team with five power-play goals, which is not surprising.
What probably has been surprising is van Riemsdyk’s playmaking, especially at even strength. He leads the team with 13 5-on-5 assists. Ten of those have been primary assists, which is the same amount Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon have this season. In fact, on a per-60-minute basis, van Riemsdyk leads the NHL in 5-on-5 primary assists. His 18 assists total put the 15-year veteran on pace for a career high.
Heinen, who came to training camp on a professional tryout and didn’t sign an actual contract until the ninth game of the season, has also been a consistent 5-on-5 producer. He’s up to 12 points in 28 games, with 11 of them coming at 5-on-5. That’s tied for sixth on the team with Brad Marchand, Charlie McAvoy, Jake DeBrusk and Matt Poitras.
Shattenkirk has also found a bit of a scoring touch recently. His goal Tuesday was his third in the last three games. The last time the Bruins were in Columbus, right after Thanksgiving, Shattenkirk had just been healthy-scratched two games in a row. The 14-year veteran and coach Jim Montgomery had a meeting, one that Shattenkirk has cited as a good reminder of how the Bruins wanted and needed him to play: quicker and more aggressively.
Before that meeting, Shattenkirk had three points in 15 games. He has eight in the 15 games since then. Montgomery sees improvement in all parts of his game, not just the production.
“He’s really poised,” Montgomery said of Shattenkirk’s recent play. “His poise, his intelligence, his calmness, you can see it kind of permeating throughout the team. And his defensive play has gotten significantly better.”
Morgan Geekie was another July 1 signing, for two years at $2 million per. He didn’t score Tuesday, but he does have eight points in the last 11 games and has played well as the first-line center between David Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha.
Not all of Sweeney’s summer signings worked out. Milan Lucic, another $1 million vet, turned out to be the biggest miss – not because of his play (he was actually playing pretty well before getting hurt), but because he was arrested in November after a domestic incident and remains on indefinite leave as the case plays out in court.
But several of them are paying major dividends, and Sweeney’s decision to spend his limited amount of money on multiple cheap veterans rather than using it all on re-signing Tyler Bertuzzi -- the move many fans wanted -- looks like the right decision as of now.
Bertuzzi, by the way, has fewer even-strength points than both van Riemsdyk and Heinen this season while making triple their combined salaries.