Boston Bruins: How good would it be to have Noel Acciari back right now?

The Boston Bruins allowed Noel Acciari to leave last summer; suddenly now he’s scoring hat-tricks for the Florida Panthers.

Now, this could all be an illusion and the Boston Bruins made a very sensible decision allowing him to depart. Or perhaps, more alarmingly, the Boston Bruins missed something and Noel Acciari is actually even more of a player than we thought.

In his whole career with the Boston Bruins, Noel Acciari managed to score just 18 regular season goals and notch just 13 assists. That, over the course of two full seasons and two seasons where he was bouncing between Boston and Providence.

Either way, we’re talking a player with a career season-high of 10 goals in the NHL and just 18 points. Since arriving with the Florida Panthers, he is just one goal away from doubling his total NHL goals – he currently sits on 17 goals. Add the 3 assists and he’s on 20 points in 44 games and will likely easily top 30 points for the year.

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This could, by no means, have been predicted by the Boston Bruins; his professional high watermark was just 15 goals in a half-season with the Providence Bruins in the AHL. However, it does beg the question; how much would we like to have him back right now?

You see; you can place a little on his usage being slightly different in Florida – his most common line mates though don’t exactly scream out elite reasons for his increased production. We’re talking Dryden Hunt, Colton Sceviour, Brett Connolly and Vincent Trochek as his most common even-strength partners.

What is up though is his ice-time; according to Frozen Pool, he’s seeing 3 minutes more per game in Florida to what he saw with the Boston Bruins’ last season. Not only that, he’s shooting at an extremely impressive 23.9%. Even David Pastrnak with his 37 goals is only shooting at 19%.

Therein lies the big problem in analysing whether he’s been a diamond in the rough all this time and Florida have found the key to unlock him, or whether he’s simply an NHL player riding a high shooting percentage that’ll come back to Earth soon.

The Boston Bruins would of course love to have him back; he played a strong role with his physicality on the fourth line. If he was able to add some scoring punch too and maybe move up to the third line, even better. Right about now, anything looks good given how flaky our recent form has been.

Now, if Noel Acciari was back in Boston Bruins colors, there’s of course zero guarantee he’s scoring at this pace. In fact, him not being in Boston colors could well be part of the reason behind such scoring; maybe he’s now got a ‘chip on his shoulder’ and is wanting to show us what we’re missing?

On a team that is lacking in secondary scoring this year, any improvement would be great. There’s no way Acciari still being here fixes our problems, but his goals would still be nice to have.

I guess we should be pleased to see one of our former guys come good, but it’s so hard to do when he still plays in the Atlantic Division and those goals could have negative results for us in the long-run!