NHL: Pluses and minuses around the league

+ St. Louis forward David Perron returned Saturday after missing 97 games because of a concussion he suffered as the result of a hit by San Jose’s Joe Thornton on Nov. 4, 2010. Perron scored a goal in the Blues’ 5-2 loss to Chicago. He also tweeted that he got a good-luck message from Thornton, which shows class on Jumbo Joe’s part.

+ New York Islanders forward Matt Moulson scored four times Saturday in a 5-4 victory over Dallas, the first NHL player to score four in a game this season. But Islanders goaltender Rick DiPietro was hurt — again. It’s a groin injury this time for the man whose X-rays and CT scans illustrate the phrase “oft-injured” in the dictionary.

+ Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard has had an excellent start. He leads the NHL with 15 wins, ranks second in goals-against average at 1.83 and was in the top 10 in save percentage, at .931. He wasn’t in goal when the Red Wings lost to Colorado on Sunday to end their seven-game winning streak.

+ The Boston Bruins were 12-0-1 in November and moved up from last in the East to second. It was their first calendar month without a regulation loss since January 1969.

-Brian Burke told an Edmonton radio station last week he had planned to rent a barn in Lake Placid, N.Y., to fight then-Edmonton general manager Kevin Lowe in response to Lowe’s signing of Dustin Penner to a free-agent offer sheet in 2007. Cooler heads prevailed and kept Burke, then the Ducks’ general manager, from staging the bout. That he even considered it is ludicrous.

- Through games Sunday, Carolina had three players in the bottom six in plus/minus. Eric Staal was a league-worst minus-17 and teammates Chad LaRose (minus-15) and Tomas Kaberle (minus-14) weren’t far behind. Staal is a better player than that. Or used to be.

-Ducks defenseman Luca Sbisa said the team “is at rock bottom right now” after its 18th loss in 21 games. But what if it’s not?

- The return of the NBA will make the ice terrible for NHL games. Oh, wait … it was terrible even when the NBA was locked out. Never mind.