BRUINS NOW OUR BEST BET
A Cup-ful of expectations as playoffs begin
As of this morning it has been one year, two months and seven days since the Patriots rallied from a you’ll-never-forget-the-numbers 28-3 deficit to claim a 34-28 overtime victory against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI.
This means it has been one year, two months and seven days since any of our big league athletic clubs has won a championship. One year, two months, seven days.
Our long Boston sports nightmare continues.
But the next man up, so to speak, are the Bruins. Are we agreed the B’s have the next, best shot to end the championship drought and provide a reason for Mayor Walsh to rubber-stamp the permits needed for a rolling rally? The quest for the Stanley Cup begins tonight at 7 at the Garden, as the B’s host the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 1 of their best-ofseven opening-round series.
If the Bruins don’t get it done this spring, the Boston sports nightmare will extend to the early days of fall, when the Red Sox stampede into the MLB postseason. Given that they look like they’re going to win the American League East by 32 games, the Sox will shoulder high expectations come October.
That’s all later on. For now, Bostonians turn their championshipstarved hearts to the Bruins. This is not to dismiss, downplay or otherwise ignore the Celtics. They’ve submitted a thrilling season under fifth-year coach Brad Stevens, but, alas, a campaign that began with Gordon Hayward crumbling to the floor is ending with Kyrie Irving being shut down after undergoing knee surgery.
The Garden will be rocking when the Celtics hit the parquet for their opening-round NBA playoff series. It will surprise nobody if they advance. But it will surprise a lot of people if they advance beyond that, and it will surprise everyone on the planet if they bring home the O’Brien Trophy.
The twist to Boston’s springtime playoff push is the role reversal. What do you think the results would have been six months ago had you asked Garden ushers, concessions workers and security personnel which team would keep them working deepest into springtime?
The Celtics would have won in a landslide. They didn’t acquire Hayward and Irving to sell tickets; they were already banging out the Garden. They acquired them to win a championship. Now the two stars are out, and with them have gone championship hopes. While it’s true that blaming playoff losses on injuries doesn’t fly around here, nobody’s going to holler for firings when the Celtics get eliminated.
Help me out with this: How often does a team enter the regular season with no expectations and then enter the playoffs with high expectations? I’m talking about the Bruins here. With all the young, untested players they were planning to sweater-up going into the 2017-18 season, the B’s were nobody’s smart pick to win the Stanley Cup, or to even advance to the conference finals.
And now? Now, some of those young players are emerging stars. Now, they have three players who have scored 30 or more goals in David Pastrnak, Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron. Now, they have a coach, Bruce Cassidy, whose place behind the bench no longer is a constant reminder of the necessary but nonetheless clumsy manner in which Claude Julien was fired.
And now the expectations have changed. With their 50-20-12 regular-season record, the Bruins are way beyond being plucky underdogs. They are Cup contenders.
Searching for a Boston sports team that went into the regular season with no expectations and then went into the postseason with very high expectations? How about the 2001 Patriots? Did anybody forecast a Super Bowl title for those guys going into the season? Nobody could know Drew Bledsoe would be injured and that Bill Belichick’s wholesale change was to install Tom Brady at quarterback.
The 2001 Pats started the regular season 0-2 and finished it 11-5. Come playoff time everyone’s expectations had changed.
The Bruins may not have a GOAT, but they do have something Brady and his mates had in January 2002: Altered expectations.