Resurrection

About a year ago today Patrice Bergeron was nailed from behind by Randy Jones. He really didn't play again until this preseason.

Bergeron has been a bit of a favorite player of mine, playing on a line with Sidney Crosby on two occasions for Team Canada; the 2005 World Juniors (the dream team, I believe Cory Perry was the third man on that line) and in the 2006 World Championship Team (Brad Boyes was the extra man there).

Bergeron already has quite a few honours in his career: He was the first player ever to win a World Championship gold medal before winning a World Junior Championship gold, he was the tournament MVP for the juniors in 2005, and I'm almost certain that at one point he was the youngest player in the NHL (although I could be wrong here). One of my favourite Bergeron moments comes from 2005 when Ovechkin went to take Bergeron out with a solid check; Bergeron braced himself and hit back (Torres/Phaneuf style) and ended up injuring Ovechkin, taking him out of the game permanently. Pretty impressive.

The good news is that Bergeron is still impressive, really impressive. I was checking up on his desjardins today, and although the sample size is small, Bergeron looks like he's a difference maker.

Quality of Comp: 0.14 (7th)
Quality of Teammates: 0.35 (2nd)
PTS/60: 2.01(5th)
GFON/60: 3.51 (4th)
GAON/60 : 1.51 (9th)
Difference: 2 (4th)

And in regards to the difference, only one player above Bergeron (Sturm) was playing a higher competition - without looking at shift charts I'd guess the two are playing together and are driving each other's pleasant results. (As a side note, Andrew Ference is one of the three ahead of Bergeron in the difference category).

One also has to imagine that Bergeron results would be better if he didn't have a 3.33% shooting percentage. For all those that believe the extreme will tend back to the average over time, Bergeron is due for some god damn goals like Edmonton is due for snow. His NHL average shooting percentage is just above 10%.

Update: Well, it looks like Patrice is back on the scoreboard.