Joe Haggerty

There was much ballyhoo and plenty of hype about the significant improvements that the Boston Bruins made this offseason, with many of those roster alterations made to better brace the B's for a Florida Panthers team that's eliminated them in the playoffs in each of the last two Stanley Cup playoffs.

A full 48 hours after getting “humbled” Iron Sheik-style by the Florida Panthers in a letdown season opener, the Bruins looked much closer to the Stanley Cup contender that everybody's expecting in a 6-4 home opener win over the Montreal Canadiens at TD Garden on Thursday night. Even better, it was a great showing by many of Boston's new players in their first regular season game in front of Bruins fans expecting big, bad things from the Black and Gold this season.

So much of the preseason chatter concerning young Bruins prospects was about Fabian Lysell and Georgii Merkulov when it probably should have been about 20-year-old Matt Poitras coming back from shoulder surgery.

There were definite signs of top-6 optimism with power play goals for David Pastrnak and Charlie Coyle in a road victory, but there's also no

The Bruins are off to a 3-2 start with Wednesday's dominating win over the Avalanche. Haggs is here for your questions.

The pot has been simmering for a while, but it was stirred to a boil this weekend in a frustrating game in Utah.

Looking for a different result after a lackluster effort against the Utah Hockey Club, the Bruins shook things up headed into the road trip finale against the struggling Nashville Predators on Tuesday night.

The Bruins are sliding into some dangerous territory at this early juncture of the hockey season.

It wasn't always pretty, but the Boston Bruins secured the result needed against a Maple Leafs team they've dominated over the last few years. And it was a major piece of help from their team captain Brad Marchand , who rose to the occasion when everybody needed it with an overtime game-winner in an imperfect 4-3 overtime victory over the Maple Leafs at TD Garden on Saturday night.

The Boston Bruins have reached the “out of answers” portion of their underachieving, underwhelming opening month to the NHL regular season.