Boston Bruins: What if Tyler Seguin was never traded?

A look at Boston’s perspective

In Tyler Seguin’s final season as a Boston Bruins roster member, he registered 16 goals and 16 assists for 32 points in a lock-out shortened 48 game season. He averaged 17:01 time on ice that year.

The next year, his first with Dallas, he played 80 games with 37 goals and 47 assists for 84 points, which remains as his career-high point total, goal total and assist total. He did all that while averaging 19:21 time on ice.

In the 2013-14 season, the year without Seguin, the Bruins deployed these five centers: Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Carl Soderberg, Chris Kelly and Ryan Spooner. That’s a strong center core, and Seguin primarily played on the wings when he was with Boston.

Here were the Bruins 8 wingers who played more than 30 games that year: Jarome Iginla, Reilly Smith*, Shawn Thornton, Jordan Caron, Milan Lucic, Brad Marchand, Loui Eriksson* and Daniel Paille.

*These players would not have played here if the Bruins never traded Seguin.

With Smith and Eriksson remaining on Dallas, that opens up time on the Bruins wings. Neither Eriksson (16:32) or Smith (14:42) averaged enough time to make up for the 19:21 Seguin averaged in Dallas.

That being said, if he played Eriksson’s 16:32 on the right-wing, Seguin would see a 14.6% decrease in deployment. Eriksson produced 37 points in 60 games with that ice time, and if you prorated his stats over 80 games, which is how many games Tyler Seguin played, using Eriksson’s point per game metric of 0.61, he would’ve had 49 points.

Meanwhile, as stated earlier, Tyler Seguin had 84 points, which amounts to a point per game total of 1.05. If we take away 14.6% of his deployment, he would have a point per game average of 0.9 instead. That would mean, in 80 games played with the Boston Bruins in the same role as Eriksson, Seguin would have produced 72 points instead of 84.