This is the time of year when the Bruins power play typically joins the traffic, weather and New Hampshire on the list of things people in Boston most like to make jokes about.

However, nobody’s laughing anymore about the Bruins man-advantage. Coach Claude Julien and his staff, who took a ton of heat for a power play that didn’t finish in the top half of the league (and was an abysmal 26th in 2013) the past three years, finally got the right personnel and put them in the right positions to be successful in 2013-14.

The Bruins enter Game 1 of their first-round series with the Detroit Red Wings tonight at the Garden fresh off finishing third in the league in power-play efficiency at 21.7 percent. There are several reasons for the Bruins’ improved power play, starting with the stability young defensemen Torey Krug and Dougie Hamilton have provided as quarterbacks on separate units.

“I think it’s been a complete group effort. I think early in the year our unit was clicking a bit, and you take a lot of pride in that, especially when that’s a role of mine, to come in and improve the power play,” said Krug, whose addition to the lineup helped the Bruins to a respectable 17.5 percent success rate in the 2013 playoffs. “It’s fun to watch all the weapons that we have and they’re capitalizing on goals. Hopefully in the playoffs, we have two units clicking at the same time.”

The B’s two groups have different looks, with Krug’s quintet relying more on shots from the point getting through for newcomer Jarome Iginla and returnees Milan Lucic and Zdeno Chara, a regular at forward on the power play for the first time this season, to tip or chase. Center David Krejci slid back from the half wall to the point with Krug this season in a change of roles from the past.

“Yeah, I don’t have many options to make some plays (as on the half wall), but when you have Z in front of the net, you don’t feel like you have to make those saucer passes and stuff. You just want to shoot it,” Krejci said.

The other quintet can get shots through from the point off the sticks of Hamilton and young forward Reilly Smith, but it relies more on finesse play from forwards Patrice Bergeron, Loui Eriksson and Carl Soderberg. Newcomers Eriksson and Soderberg are able to make high-skill plays even when given little room. Smith played the point in the AHL last season and it didn’t take long for the Bruins to send him there during his first NHL season.

“He has good vision, he has poise with the puck and the reason we put him there was because of that. We felt he really had a good view of the ice and could find players early on,” Julien said of Smith.

Although there are differences between the two groups, Red Wings coach Mike Babcock sees similarities between them.

“Size,” Babcock recently told the Detroit media. “Their ability to retrieve pucks. Everybody in the National Hockey League — off a faceoff, off a puck put off the wall, off a shot — tries to put as much pressure as they can on you. The bigger you are, the more you can handle.”

For once, the B’s power play enters the playoffs as a source of concern for opponents rather than criticism for observers.