The Boston Bruins have tied the NHL wins record. Here's how they did it

The big, bad Boston Bruins are good — historically, record-breakingly good.

They have a better regular-season record than those Wayne Gretzky Oilers teams in the '80s. Better than the 2000s Detroit Red Wings team with 10 future Hall of Famers. Better than Bobby Orr's early-'70s Bruins. 

With their 2-1 victory over the New Jersey Devils Saturday, the Bruins have 62 wins — tying the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning and the 1995-96 Detroit Red Wings — and they still have three games left to claim the record as their own.

It's a stunning success story for a team that most prognosticators expected to either barely make the playoffs this year, or to miss them altogether.

Here's a look at the stats showing just how good they've been and what it means for their Stanley Cup chances. (Spoiler alert: probably nothing.)

The Bruins have been so dominant this year, you can pick almost any stat and they'll be at or near the top of the league. Let's start with the obvious one: they have 129 points in the standings. The closest team, the Carolina Hurricanes, have 109.

Put another way, the gap between the Bruins and the Hurricanes is as large as the gap between No. 2 and the No. 18 Calgary Flames, who are currently outside the playoffs in the Western Conference.

The Bruins lead the league in goals against, home record, away record and have the best penalty kill. They have six winning streaks of five games or more and have only once lost two regulation-time games in a row.

And when you break down the numbers further, their dominance this season only becomes clearer:

How are the Bruins dominating like this?

Though they have Hall of Fame sure-thing Patrice Bergeron and 57-goal scorer David Pastrňák, the Bruins are less a team of superstars and