It’s easy to watch how the Detroit Red Wings played against the Tampa Bay Lightning in their first-round series and say, “Yeah, the Boston Bruins could have done that.” Dare I even suggest that the Black and Gold could have even challenged the shorthanded Tampa Bay squad and made it a series.
You have to get there to play, though, and the Bruins, obviously, did not do that. In fact, for the second season in a row, the B’s crumbled their way out of postseason play. And for the second straight early summer, are left to wonder what could have been had the team performed when they needed it most.
“There are a lot of similarities. We, you know, going down the last part of last year of both seasons we felt we were going to make the playoffs and didn’t make the playoffs, so both very disappointing,” B’s president Cam Neely said. “As a player, you shouldn’t say, “Okay what kind of team do we have?” You should look at it, “I want to play playoff hockey.” And we didn’t get the job done the last couple years.”
This collapse was even worse than the 2015 one, too, as the Bruins ended the year on a borderline unbelievable 3-8-1 run (seven of a possible 24 points), but Neely felt as if his team was ‘closer’.
In every sense of the word.
“I still think we have room to improve in [a developed identity]. But I believe the group was a closer group; they enjoyed playing for each other and working hard for each other,” said Neely. “I thought there was, you know aside from a couple stretches, we were a team that showed more passion probably than the year prior. But it’s still an area we need to improve upon.
“We should be playing right now. We should’ve locked up the third seed and who knows? But that didn’t happen, and we’re all extremely disappointed the way the season ended,” noted Neely. “But having said that, that plan was not a one-offseason fix. We know what our goals are, we know what we need to improve, and we’re taking the necessary steps to continue to do that.”
But let’s just say, for just a minute here, that the Bruins found a way to out-stumble the Red Wings into third place in the Atlantic Division and drew the Bolts in the first round. What are we doing right now?
Well, besides getting ready for a Game 5 showdown at TD Garden, you might ask?
When I looked at the Bruins and Bolts season series -- which the teams split with two wins each while both wins for each team came on the road -- I saw two teams that were considerably even at least in terms of their head-to-head affairs. Factor in the loss of Steven Stamkos (a player that’s torched the Bruins throughout his career, with 17 goals and 24 points in 31 career games against the B’s) and Anton Stralman, and a series with Boston and Tampa might have been dead even.
The obvious issue for the Bruins in such a series would have been finding a way to solve Ben Bishop, who finished the first round with a .950 save percentage, and matching the production of the highly effective combination of Alex Killorn, Tyler Johnson, and winger Nikita Kucherov.
On the offensive front, I think the Bruins could have hung with the Bolts. At least if we look at how the Bruins finished the season. The Bruins finished the year with 21 goals over their last seven games of the season, including a six-spot on the Blues, four on the ‘Hawks, and five on the Wings.
But even with much of the Tampa Bay attack coming from their three-headed monster, you’d need to find ways to battle through a 6-foot-7 Bishop that had taken his game to another damn level this season. That’s plausible, at least based on career splits that have seen Bishop win just four games and post a .916 save percentage in 11 career games against the Bruins, though Bishop had two wins and a .942 save percentage in four head-to-heads with the Black and Gold this season.
“Any time you miss the playoffs when you’re in the position that we are, it’s frustrating and disappointing, but I think if you look at our organization as a whole, from year to year we’re a different organization,” Neely, at a podium with owner Jeremy Jacobs and CEO Charlie Jacobs, said on Wednesday. “I think we’re deeper in the prospects than we’ve been in a long, long time. You know that’s one of the areas where it’s failed us to be able to plug in some young guys the last couple years. So I think that part has vastly improved and we still know we need to make improvements. I’m not sitting up here saying we’re a Stanley Cup contending team, but I’m saying we should’ve been in the playoffs.”
The reason the Bruins are not there in the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs, though, is a no-show in both games that mattered (the Winter Classic, Game 82 of the season). And games that didn’t matter, too.
“We failed on numerous occasions when there were some big games. And we can go back to even the Winter Classic how we played in that game versus how well we played in Montreal against that same team. And you know there were some games that we failed to get what we needed,” B’s coach Claude Julien said of this year’s group. “For example, the New Jersey game. [We were] so dominate but yet we weren’t able to come up with the win in that certain game. And there were other games and right now it’s more how did we play so well against Detroit and not able to win that game against Ottawa. That’s where we failed. Somehow the consistency wasn’t there. And we thought we had a decent amount of consistency at one point but then it slipped. And throughout the year we lost some games that I really felt were important for us to win and we weren’t able to do that.”
It was over for the Bruins once they were unable to get the third-spot in the Atlantic Division, really, and to suggest they could hang with the Lightning in a seven-game series is to have an idea as to what this team truly was this season. Something that, even as the smoke clears, remains a mystery other than the fact that they were in the literal term unfit for postseason play for the second straight spring.
Man, does that 6-1 loss to the Ottawa Senators sting. As do the dozen or so other no shows.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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