The Bruins Join The Pain
Back in 2016 I pointed out the curse of being the best team ever in a regular season. With the Warriors flaming out in spectacular fashion in the finals, all 4 major sports now had a regular-season champion that couldn’t get the job done. The 2001 Seattle Mariners couldn’t even reach the finals. The Warriors flamed out after being up 3-1 in the finals. The 2007 Patriots finally ran out of gas when it mattered most, and, at the time, the Detroit Red Wings of 95-96 had 62 wins and failed to win the Stanley Cup.
Since that comic the hockey representative has now been replaced twice. First, with the famous 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning, who tied the Red Wings yet had one of the most embarassing exits of all time, getting swept by the 8th seed Columbus Blue Jackets, who at that point had literally never won a playoff series before. The Lightning would eventually go on to win 2 straight Stanley Cups directly after this to dull that pain. Now the pain has been dulled even further. Welcome, our newest member of B.U.S.T.
The 2022 Boston Bruins reached the mighty heights of 65 wins and 135 points in a season, both records. They got to face a lame Florida Panthers team in the first round. They went up 3-1, as if to try and spit in the face of two curses at once. They were fools. Absolute fools. The 3-1 lead curse and the Winningest Team Curse struck them down with hearty abandon, sending Boston into the depths of hell where they belong. And the Bruins are the most likable team from that frozen hellscape of Pahk’d Cahs.
I’m torn on whether the sweep by the Blue Jackets or 3-1 failure is actually worse. Needing exactly 1 win and losing 3 straight to an 8th seed as the greatest team of all time is pretty fucking bad. The Panthers are actually up 3-0 on the Leafs as of this writing so maybe the 8th seed was actually good the whole time (insert Leafs choke joke here as well).
Anyway, if we can get the Celtics and Red Sox to absolutely blow it in the same fashion, we can finally get some true justice to the past 2 decades of Boston Sports excellence by making them also the biggest chokers.
This is a bit nitpicky but I wouldnt consider a team that went to the finals as “completely fumbling the bag”, after all they won several playoff games after their stellar regular season
Failing to even get there like the Mariners or pulling a Bruins and bombing out in the first round after a recordbreaking season on the other hand…
Sorry, but the Red Sox aren’t going anywhere.
We’d need about 45 years of choking to get some justice for New York’s undeserved dominance of the sports scene. And that’s just for the Yankees alone. Boston’s had a cute run of a couple decade. New Yorkers are still bragging about the greatness of their baseball teams from a time before colour video exists.
I agree, the Yankees death can not come soon enough
What really frustrates me about the Yankees is they can always just pay more money to fix their mistakes. Unlike smaller teams that have to be extremely careful with their prospects and free agency bids, the Yankees can just buy whoever they want and then buy some new player if the first one doesn’t work out. They spent $300M on Cole, who’s generally been very good, then they decide to trade and sign Montas (one of the top available pitchers at the time). Oh, Montas it hurt you say? Let’s just drop another $160M to get Carlos Rodon! And while we’re at it, let’s sign Judge for another $360M. All this while eating the salary of guys like Donaldson who have generally not been great.
I remember seeing a graph that charted the amount of money spent in free agency for each team, and how much of that money was considered a “bad value” per WAR. Yankees had BY FAR the highest of both, and it wasn’t particularly close. That’s why I hate when Yankees fans talk about how great the franchise is, they are the height of baseball privilege and do what pretty much every team aside from the Dodgers and Mets cannot do.
B.U.S.T.
Best Until Success Time?
Best Until Successful Temporarily?
Boston Ugh So Terrible?
Broken Ultimate Season Triumph
2 is 100% more than 1. So now with 100% more boston, not 25% more.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct!
The “most likable team from that frozen hellscape of Pahk’d Cahs” comment brings up a thought I’ve had that I’m possibly way off base on about the big NYC sports rival city in the other direction. Now Philly sports fans have a lot of notoriety even beyond their immediate division rivals in multiple sports. I mainly just follow football and baseball, and I’m a Giants and Mets fan respectively, so negative feelings about the Eagles and Phillies are pretty hard wired into me. Basketball and hockey are more I can enjoy a good game here and there but I haven’t really been invested in either in over 20 years and can’t honestly claim to really have a favorite team in either. But even from a verry casual place I know the Flyers are historically seen by other fandoms as a classic goon team with fans along the same lines. Yet I’ve never had the impression that the Sixers (in terms of the team itself and more significantly their fans) are seen as being especially bad in that way. I am I just way off there or are Sixers fans the one Philly fanbase that’s pretty chill for a Northeastern team?
I would like to point out, as a Boston sports fan, if you would choose to add the MLS you’d get even more Boston in that list. The New England Revolution set the record for most points in a season and then lost their first playoff match in penalties.
Both 18-1 and 135 points are records that need asterisks anyway, IMHO. The Pats won more games than the ’72 ‘Phins because the regular season is two games longer now. The Bruins’ “record” benefits by both a longer season and a more generous distribution of points after regulation ties. If you applied the 1976-77 rules where games tied in regulation just ended, they would have had 6 fewer points and, maybe more tellingly, 6 fewer wins than that year’s champion. The two extra games don’t even factor in. The Bruins may hold a record for most regular season points but there is no objective way of saying they were the best regular season team ever.
(I know, this is a football blog not hockey, I’ll go back to my archived Puck Daddy articles now)
Counterpoint: comparing eras doesn’t make these teams less of a choker. They did it in their current era under rules that apply to all teams
It’s 33% more Boston, actually
Given the other two are Seattle and Golden State, it’s 100% more Boston.
I came here for the math.
i cant tell if the math is bad or if everyone is using different denominators
You know why Boston sports really annoy me? The entire city tries to paint itself as an underdog. They try to lean into this whole identity as a working-class, salt of the earth, beer-and-chips kind of city that works hard for everything they get. They try to don this small-market mentality, but their teams don’t behave like small market teams. You don’t get to claim a “curse” and moan about how the sports gods hate your team, when the Celtics owned the 70s, and split the 80s, when the Bruins have had long stretches of being pretty good, when the Red Sox have even since come back and won multiple world series titles since they broke the “curse”, and (good god) when the Patriots have had unarguably the greatest dynasty in football.
You are not the underdog. There is no conspiracy against you. You are the Yankees. You are the Golden State Warriors. You are the Dallas Cowboys. You are a big market that has hogged postseason success in EVERY major sport at one point or another. You don’t get to have it both ways.
side note: Love New England in general though. My sister lives out in Vermont so I spend a lot of time out there and love the area, just can’t stand the sports.
As a Boston fan, this is the one thing I genuinely can’t stand about other Boston fans. How can you flex all of your success in sports and then turn around and act like you’re an underdog. You’re the sports town that everyone dreams of. You always have a team in genuine championship contention (seriously, Boston went from 2005-2019 with at least one of their teams playing in a Conference (or League for MLB) Championship of some kind and it took a literal pandemic to end that streak. They’ve had two teams make it back since and you have to go back to the mid-90s before you see consecutive seasons where that wasn’t the case.
We’re not underdogs. We haven’t been underdogs really ever. Some of our TEAMS might have been underdogs at one point, but none of them are now. I think it’s even more insufferable than New Yorkers because in our case, we want the praise that comes with being a dominant sports town while still being treated like the loveable underdogs that are hard on their luck. That’s not how it works.
Red Sox fans: We have to kill the Yankees.
No, you are the Yankees!
And the Red Sox are Yankees.
As a Bruins fan, yeah this one hurt.
The thing is, throughout the whole season, I was just waiting for that moment. A point where you could say, “Yep, this is where things sort of started to fall apart.” and just look back on it like a what-if. Some type of excuse if you will. We saw it with those 2007 Pats. Yeah, they went 16-0, but they had a few of those games down the stretch where they looked human. Extremely beatable if you came in with the right gameplan or they just had an off-night.
What made this failure so inexplicable is that it just came out of nowhere. The Bruins showed literally no signs of collapse before this series. Were they banged up? Sure, but they had managed all season with some guys going on LTIR and still wrecked shit, plus they went up 3-1 with Bergeron missing the first four games. Maybe the mediocre Power Play, then? Wasn’t an issue in that series. They routinely killed Florida in the penalty. Bad depth scoring, maybe? Nope, they ran Lyon out of the net and gave Bobrovsky plenty of hell. Goaltending? Sure, Linus Ullmark had one of the most random dominant seasons from a goalie ever, but usually they start showing signs of a greater problem well before you even get to that point. And the Bruins’ team defense remained elite all season so even if he was off, they would protect him regardless.
There was just nothing that could pointed to this happening other than Florida being a team of destiny. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it, honestly. I knew something was going to go wrong but good lord, not like this. Never like this. Hopefully if, and whenever the Celtics fuck things up, they do it like normal and just lose in a tough 6 games.
I don’t know why Montgomery decided to stop what was working in the regular season with the goaltending… i.e. alternating them frequently. I know it’s normal to stick with your number 1 goaltender in the playoffs, but I think the Bruins might have won their first round if they used Swayman more, instead of having Ullmark play 6 straight games.
My only guess is that Swayman consistently struggled against Florida. Even then, Ullmark clearly looked off the entire series, especially in his final three starts. Swayman should have gotten the call in Game 6, if not earlier once it was clear that Ullmark was cooked.
The Mariners’ pain is made worse by the fact that 2001 was the last time we’d even make the playoffs for 20 years. We basically wasted the prime years of Ichiro and Felix.
I would say the lightning is worse because, despite expectations, and least the bruins still won a game, much less 3. The Lightning absolutely WILTED in the face of pressure as admitted by their coach. Teams let their foot off the gas all the time, but it’s rarer when a team gets popped in the mouth and can’t respond literally at all over the course of an entire series.
those Mariners almost got ousted by the Dodgers last year
Panthers may have barely made it in as an 8th seed, but they did win the President’s Trophy a year ago. They weren’t exactly scrubs out there.
And now they’re crushing the Maple Leafs.
My opinion is 50% more Boston. 2/4 is 150% of 1/3.
I must be mad. The original fraction was 1/4, and it became 2/4 (Boston Bruins replacing the Detroit Red Wings)…which would be double (i.e. 100% more), not either 25% or 50%.
I know its early, but the Rays are on pace to go 130-30, so this list might be changing soon
I wonder what stupid move Cash will do next.