Boston fans, the future is on the phone and wants to have a heart-to-heart.
We’ve moved beyond the celebrated emergence of adults who had never held a newspaper to adults who have never asked themselves if the last championship is closer to now than the next one.
These are growing pains.
If you love your team, you’ll get through them and learn that the journey is the prize.
Henri Jokiharju
June 15, 2011, was a surreal day in the lives of many Bruins fans young, old and in between, many of whom had long lost reasonable hope that the day would ever come.
It came, it was nuts, especially what happened on Vancouver’s streets in the aftermath, and the Bruins owned the city again for one summer. Even the three-sport media recognized its oversight in dismissing the Bruins as irrelevant.
The fans knew better. Win or lose against the Canucks, they’d already come back in droves, as old O’Reilly 24 and Bourque 7 sweaters appeared tattered and torn but proudly worn by fans who, beginning in 2007-08, realized this was a team they could believe in and throw themselves behind.
While that recently expired era of Bruins hockey fell short of a Stanley Cup sequel, momentum followed in the form of two close brushes with the Cup and three other Presidents Trophy campaigns.
As an aside, the 2020 playoffs were a sham. While I won’t suggest that the Cup should have been awarded the Bruins based on their 2019-20 record, holding a tournament a full offseason later in the dog days of summer and telling us this hastily arranged, beach-blanket, bubble-hockey contest represented the culmination of that Covid-canceled campaign was not only insulting to the benefactors of the hockey business (the season-ticket holders and cable/streaming subscribers) but to the trophy itself.
Everything has a price apparently, but in fairness to the suits of the sport, the players were complicit.
However you shake it out, 2020 is best treated as though it never happened.
Therefore, if Brad Marchand helps the Florida Panthers make it back for the third straight Stanley Cup final, they and not the Tampa Bay Lightning will be the first to advance to three straight championship rounds since the Edmonton Oilers were swept in 1983 by the New York Islanders, then beat the Isles in five in ’84 and then repeated against Philadelphia in ’85.
Nothing against the Bolts, they’re my favorite product of the ’90s southern expansion/migration of the NHL. I’ve enjoyed many games at Amelie and hope to go back. Tampa Bay has been an excellent NHL market.
And what of the Bruins, whose 2019-20 team was much more ready for primetime than the 2018-19 team that benefited so greatly by the Blue Jackets’ stunning sweep of the mighty Lightning, clearing Boston’s path to a winnable final they simply weren’t ready to win?
The final act to this stunning end to the era takes place on Tuesday night at TD Garden against the slumping New Jersey Devils, who are playoff bound but running out of opportunities for a single dress rehearsal they would approve.
If the upcoming draft lottery is all the Bruins can feel good about, then it’s a long road ahead.
There has to be more, and the Bergeron-esque play of 20-year-old center Fraser Minten qualifies as a prize that might stand as the legacy piece of the 2025 teardown.
Rink Rap thusly arrives at the season finale with two immediate questions, to be followed by many subsequent questions.
In the immediate, the loss of Brandon Carlo to Toronto (for Minten and a first-round pick) necessitates a strong effort to persuade impending free agent Henri Jokiharju from testing the open market on July 1.
Since his below-the-radar acquisition from Buffalo on March 7 (for a fourth-round pick in 2026), the 6-foot, 200-pound defenseman has beautifully complemented the powerful Nikita Zadorov and brought calm to the Bruins’ breakout game. Credit Boston’s pro scouts for identifying the right-shooting Finn selected 29th overall in 2017 by Chicago while on the cusp of age 26 (June 17), his best years immediately ahead.
It’s been reported by WEEI that a resignation will be forthcoming in the Bruins’ front office on Wednesday, the day after the season ends. Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs is already on record giving his full support to team president Cam Neely and his general manager, Don Sweeney. Jacobs apparently doubled down on that message of support when Frank Seravalli followed up.
EEI could be onto something, but it makes no sense that it would be a major resignation because Sweeney, in concert with Neely, went beyond the Marchand move and traded Carlo and Charlie Coyle, two core members with term remaining on their contracts.
When one considers how consistent the Bruins had won prior to 2024-25 (50 W’s per 82 games played) once Sweeney got his hand-picked coach (Bruce Cassidy) in there, it’s the popular appetite to blow it all up and reinvent from the ground floor that makes no sense to ownership.
Sweeney’s critics spotlight a couple of blown draft picks 10 years ago, but how many of those critics today would commit $9.15 million to Mat Barzal for the next six seasons? It’s easy to pick on what went wrong predicting the future of an 18-year-old hockey player, it’s another thing to get it right. Yes, several subsequent choices were hits, but the overwhelming majority of Sweeney’s critics were shouting for Barzal.
For those who want to reinvent the wheel, consider the incredible luck the Edmonton Oilers had to win the draft lottery over and over again until they finally did so in the year that Connor McDavid was 18.
The NHL now has 32 competent management teams trying to win one trophy. Given what the Bruins have accomplished over the past decade, it’s more than understandable that ownership believes in its management.
In the interest of full disclosure, I think the Bruins have been slow to come around to the realization that their Sweeney-era teams have lacked the necessary aggression/toughness to win the Cup. I don’t think that has prevented them from winning since the 2022-23 season inclusive.
That incredible season took a large number of questions to fall their way, and on top of that was Linus Ullmark’s Vezina Trophy performance in net. Minus Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, the 2023-24 Bruins got an amazing performance at center from Coyle, and while the dynamics of their goaltending evened out and finished with Swayman in the playoffs, elite goaltending once again made the Bruins look better than they were tee to green.
This season, just about everything not named Pavel Zacha has gone wrong. David Pastrnak and Morgan Geekie overcame slow starts to play their best hockey down the stretch, giving us something to enjoy in the waning weeks of a season that went far off the rails.
A rotation of recalls from the AHL Bruins has led to Fabian Lysell’s first NHL assist and first NHL goal. Not every AHLer has been thrown a bone, but left-shot defenseman Frederic Brunet and centerman John Farinacci will presumably make their NHL debuts on the final night of the season.
Before the game, Geekie will likely receive NESN’s 7th Player Award; while the TV38 legacy award for redefining one’s potential is always a season-ending highlight, what everyone really cares about is a contract extension for the restricted free agent.
It’s an important offseason for the Bruins but one that cannot be defined by the upcoming (and relatively unheralded draft) but one that holds interest where it concerns Geekie, Jokiharju and July 1.
As for more hockey to watch in person, the Providence Bruins have the Calder Cup playoffs coming up after Easter, and it is assumed here that Lysell and Minten will be among those rejoining the AHL squad for that pursuit. Get a look at 24-year-old RW Dalton Bancroft.
These are growing pains. If you love your team, you’ll get through them just fine.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 