B’s Cup dreams hang in the balance
NHL allowing players to head home
Less than a week into the Great Sports Blackout of 2020, the NHL is desperately clinging to the hope in the face of the coronavirus that some semblance of a Stanley Cup playoff can be played and a champion crowned.
On Sunday night, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people for the next eight weeks. On Monday, the NHL changed its directive to players for remaining in their teams’ cities and allowing them to go home, to any country, and continue their self-quarantine till through March 27. The hope is that the league would be able to open training camps 45 days into the 60-day shutdown directive by the CDC and then start play.
That is the latest best-case scenario. Don’t blink. It could change the next time you look at your smartphone. When we’ve made plans this past week, the chortling from up above has never been louder.
Considering the sliver of a margin left for further delay, now might be the time to start wrapping our minds around what anything less than that scenario would most likely bring — a cancellation of the rest of the season. And there may not be another team that could be affected more adversely — from a strictly sporting standpoint, of course — than the Bruins.
Not only had the B’s been atop the NHL standings by a wide margin at the time of the stoppage, there is a feeling that this championship window is closing on them. The season of 2019-20 may be the last chance for this team’s core group — which has been to three finals, winning one, in the last decade — to win another Cup.
Let’s start with the most obvious issue. Torey Krug may have played his last game as a Bruin. The top-four defenseman and power-play dynamo loves playing for the B’s. The B’s, having nurtured and developed him into the player he is today, love everything he brings as a player. But so far, the two have not been able to come together on the valuation of his talents. The B’s would be poorer without Krug’s services, that much is undeniable.
The same goes for Jaroslav Halak, perhaps GM Don Sweeney’s shrewdest signing. Halak, another UFA-tobe, has been instrumental in the team getting the best out of Tuukka Rask, from both workload management and competitive standpoints. If Halak moves on, it’s a big void the B’s would have to fill. Daniel Vladar has had a very good season in Providence, but bringing him up to the NHL level next year might be jumping the gun on his development.
Then there’s the age of the core group. Zdeno Chara, another UFA, will be 43 on Wednesday. With his reach and his physicality and his smarts, he remains an excellent shutdown defenseman, but who knows what another year will do to his skills.
Patrice Bergeron was on course to set a career-high in goals, but he’ll be 35 in July and has dealt with nagging core injuries the last couple of seasons.
David Krejci (33) and Tuukka Rask (33) will be heading into the final years of their contracts and it’s anyone’s guess what they’d want to do after those deals are up.
We all knew this current era of excellence wouldn’t last forever, but it would be particularly cruel if it ended this way.
If the season is snuffed out and this group can’t reach the same heights, it wouldn’t be the first time that the trajectory of the franchise was altered by world events greater than athletics. Before the outbreak of World II, the Bruins had won two of the previous three Stanley Cups. In early 1942, the famed line of Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer and Woody Dumart left the game for three-plus seasons. The B’s went on a 29year Cup drought.
There were bigger things at play back then, as there are now. But here’s hoping the league’s current plan defies the rapid evolution of this crisis, stays on course and teams get to play for the Cup. May the social distancing and self-quarantining most of us have started to take seriously (some more reluctantly than others) pays off and the spread of the disease takes effect.
The B’s great record would afford them no guarantees of a Cup, but this group deserves to win or lose it on the ice.