Heading into Thursday night's game in San Jose -- a 7-4 loss to the Sharks -- the Boston Bruins were slumping. They'd won just one of their last five games, and their offense had been anemic. Six goals in 310 minutes of hockey, while allowing 11.

If you allow 11 goals in 310 minutes, you should reasonably expect to come out with a lot more than three points, but alas, the Bruins cannot muster any sort of meaningful run support for poor Tuukka Rask. This, in a nutshell, has been the Bruins' problem all year.

Last year, the Bruins finished third in the league with 3.15 goals per game. During the lockout-shortened season they finished 13th at 2.65 per. The year before, they were tied for second at 3.17. And before that they were fifth at 2.98. For years, then, the Bruins have been a dominant offensive force over any given 82-game period. Ahead of the San Jose game, though, the offense was just 23rd in the league at just 2.35 goals per game, one spot and two-hundredths of a goal ahead of the pitiable Carolina Hurricanes.

This came even as the team was still ninth in goals against per game at 2.42, marking a slight step down from the previous four seasons (in reverse chronological order: second, third, sixth, second) but still among the best teams in the league. And that's with a slow start from the reigning Vezina winner, and with one of the best defensemen in the league injured.

Which, okay, you can blame at least some of the Bruins' struggles in recent weeks on the fact that Zdeno Chara has been sidelined for some time now. He's missed 17 of the team's first 26 games, having been out of the lineup since Oct. 23. The Bruins' possession numbers have suffered greatly as a consequence, falling from 55.1 percent with Chara, to 52.1 percent without him. That's not a small difference, obviously, but the Bruins have the personnel to keep pushing the puck in the right direction.

What they don't have, near as anyone can tell these days, is someone who can actually put the puck in the net with any kind of reliability.

Yeah, they're shooting less than 5 percent as a team at even strength, and that number is bound to come up, but the question is, “How much?”

The fact of the matter is that the Bruins aren't scoring because what they've done, pretty systematically over the past several years, is put themselves in a position where they're just out of options.

With David Krejci on the shelf, as he has been for some time, this is a team that's pretty shallow down the middle. It really is lacking in any sort of offensive punch. You'd expect a team to struggle without its No. 2 center, obviously, but what the Bruins are flailing with here is more than a little extreme. The loss of a Krejci-type doesn't account for a decline of 0.8 goals per game, even if you want to say the Bruins have also had rotten luck. Which, again, they have.

But it really does go back to the systematic selling-off of parts, to some extent, that has painted the Bruins into so desperate a corner. The cap has been mismanaged to an hilarious extent for a period of a few years at this point, and now even being able to write off Marc Savard's sizable AAV doesn't get them out of the woods; Peter Chiarelli pushed all in on last year's team being able to win another Cup, went bust, and now carries sizable penalties for this year. That's Problem No. 1.

And Problem No. 2 is that Problem No. 1 cost the team the ability to re-sign Jarome Iginla, who scored 30 goals last year playing alongside Krejci and Milan Lucic. The thinking was that they'd replace that scoring... somehow? There was never any actual plan advanced to make up for the loss of 30 goals other than, “We'll figure it out.”

They have not done so, nor were they ever going to.

The team's biggest goal contributors apart from Iginla last year — Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Milan Lucic, and Reilly Smith; they combined for 99 goals, an average of nearly 25 per player — have flatly not been effective at all this year. All told, these forwards have just 20 goals between them this season, and Marchand leads the pack, and the team, with six. I guess you'd say that's balanced, but it's also rather poor. Dougie Hamilton has more than Smith at this point. Carl Soderberg paces the team with 17 points.

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