Preview: Bruins Welcome Vegas To Td Garden

Just the facts

• When: Tonight, 7 PM
• Where: TD Garden – Boston, Ma
• How to follow: NESN, 98.5 The Sports Hub
• Opposing perspective:Knights on Ice

Know your enemy

• 9-5-1, 19PTS, 2nd in the Pacific Division
• Jack Eichel: 7G-13A-20PTS; Mark Stone: 9G-8A-17PTS; Mitch Marner: 2G-13A-15PTS
• Adin Hill: 5-2-0, 2.84 GAA, .891 save percentage

Game notes

• The Bruins welcome their second consecutive Western Conference opponent to TD Garden tonight as the Vegas Golden Knights skate into town. This is the first game of an East Coast-ish trip for Vegas, who will play in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo after tonight. Maybe more like “Eastern Time Zone Plus Detroit,” but you get the gist.
• Vegas is off to a good start this season, sitting just a few points behind the red-hot Edmonton Oilers in the Pacific Division. However, they’ve had an up-and-down stretch of late. They lost their last game, but won the one before that; before that, they lost three in a row, but before THAT, they won three in a row.
• Mark Stone, who should be hitting LTIR within a few weeks to make sure he’s ready for the playoffs, leads the Golden Knights with nine goals. Vegas is also getting good depth scoring from guys like Brett Howden, Victor Olofsson, and Trevor Connelly.
• Carter Hart suffered some kind of lower-body injury in practice last week and was unavailable for the Knights for a few days. He was cleared to play in Vegas’s Friday game against New Jersey, but Adin Hill stepped into the starter’s role in his place. Hart should be available tonight, but it remains to be seen whether or not he draws back in.
• The goals haven’t been piling up for Mitch Marner, but he has been racking up the assists, with 13 on the season. Marner is in the midst of a nine-game point streak.
• Nikita Zadorov avoided suspension over the weekend, instead receiving a $5,000 fine for punching Alex Vlasic in the head during a scrum.
• There’s little else to report for the B’s at the moment, with the only real choices facing Marco Sturm involve which guys to swap in and out. Sean Kuraly and Jonathan Aspirot drew back in against Chicago, but it’s not clear if that was intended to be a brief rotation or a longer-term spot in the lineup. Good problems to have, I guess.

See ya tonight!