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About Joe Haggerty

Joe Haggerty has covered the Boston Bruins and the NHL for the Woburn Daily Times Chronicle over the last six seasons and does actually remember the last time the Black and Gold were favored in a playoff series. Haggerty grew up in a hockey family, but the closest he came to playing ice hockey was enrolling in an ice skating class. Haggs is old enough to remember when TV guys like Mike Milbury, Rick Middleton and Andy Brickley skated for the B’s, but still young enough to think that Milan Lucic could be the next Big Hockey Thing in Boston.

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MOST RECENT COLUMNS
The Hat Trick: Operation Chara Is a Potential Solution to the Drought
11/06/09 11:46 EST
Things were getting downright historical for the Bruins Thursday night while matching up against the Montreal Canadiens, and not at all in a good way. Racing against time to avoid earning the title of most offensively inadequate team in 80 years of Black and Gold hockey, the Bruins simply couldn’t score a goal no matter what was attempted. The kitchen sink was chucked. The vulcanized rubber peppered the Montreal net with sufficient follow-up effort. Dogs and cats were living in matrimonial harmony while the hibernating Bears found new ways to come up short. The B’s team simply couldn’t locate the back of the net even with hockey’s version of GPS. For a third straight game -- after dropping consecutive shutout losses on the road for only the sixth time in franchise history – a shutout was looming with all manner of unpleasant questions to follow. The gloom momentarily worsened when the B’s finally appeared to score in the second period only
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The Hat Trick: B's Offense Downright Offensive
11/04/09 08:24 EST
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The numbers are beginning to tell the story with the Bruins offense this season, and this page-turner isn’t pretty. People will point to the absence of Marc Savard to explain the shortcomings of a team that can’t score during 5-on-5 play, and really, really, really has no shot at lighting the lamp once it sets out on the power play. But it goes well beyond not having Savard or bruising, human space-maker Milan Lucic in the lineup for much of the next month — if not longer. There are brief glimmers of offense as attested by Marco Sturm’s first-period storming of the Detroit net in Boston’s 2-0 loss Tuesday night at Joe Louis Arena — but Sturm couldn’t finish off the play against a diving, flopping Chris Osgood after Patrice Bergeron’s original long shot from the side wall created the B’s offensive opportunity. Savard said earlier this season after a loss that “We’re all Swedes. No Finnish for us tonight.”
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The Hat Trick: The Bruins Are Desperate For a Goal Scorer
11/02/09 02:08 EST
It came down to one simple difference in the Bruins' tightly wrapped 1-0 defeat at the hands of the Rangers Sunday afternoon at Madison Square Garden. The B’s outshot the Rangers by a 29-23 count and outhit New York by a thumping 41-28 margin on a day when Boston normally might have been satisfied with plenty of the things accomplished on the frozen sheet. There was ample grit and discipline up and down the roster, but the “want to” quotient wasn’t the problem. It took a few weeks, but the Bruins have finally locked into their structured, systematic defensive style of play, and that’s been apparent since their skaters returned from a two-game road trip with a broken-down Milan Lucic and a busted-up Marc Savard. The B’s have allowed only 11 goals in those six games with both key contributors out of the lineup, but that hasn’t even been close to the issue at hand as Boston continues to hover at the .500 mark. The issue has been that the Big
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The Hat Trick: Three Lessons From a Reality Check
10/30/09 01:17 EST
It’s taken nearly a month for the reality to sink in, but some things are becoming quite clear about the Bruins. Minus the speed and game-breaking ability of Phil Kessel and without two of their best players (Marc Savard, Milan Lucic) for the foreseeable future, the B’s simply are not two or three goals better than many teams in the NHL. The Black and Gold will battle, grind and muck — as they did Thursday night in a 2-1 loss to the Devils at the TD Garden (recap) — but this group of willing-but-not-always-able skaters is going to be involved in a lot of one-goal games and overtime/shootout scenarios. Tim Thomas got a piece of both of New Jersey’s goals, but both pucks slid through the hole in his leg pads and trickled into the painted area, where David Clarkson and Dainius Zubrus popped them in — Zubrus’ score coming with less than 90 seconds remaining in the third period of a tie game. There will be nights like Thursday when Boston
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