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Why The Boston Bruins Made An Early Exit From The NHL Playoffs

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The NHL’s best regular season team is gone from the playoffs. The Boston Bruins won the President’s Trophy, given to the team with the most regular season points, and the Bruins then ousted the Detroit Red Wings in five games to open the playoffs. But it all came undone in the second round, as Boston lost Game 7 last night at home to the Montreal Canadiens by a 3-1 count. How did it happen?

My easy answer is these situations is just to say that it’s life in the NHL. And there’s a lot of truth to that. In no other sport are regular season results less reliable as a guide to postseason success than the National Hockey League.


In the NBA, if you have the best team you’re reasonably assured of at least getting to the conference finals and probably more. In the NHL, a 1-seed losing in the first round has been an occurrence that happens often enough that no one is even shocked. College basketball may have successfully marketed “March Madness”, but it really has nothing on “Spring Madness.”

That said, the better teams still win more often than not—it’s not a total crapshoot, and as a partisan Bruins fan, it would be the height of excuse-making to write this series off as nothing more than a coin flip gone awry. It was a combination of bad play and bad luck that undid the B’s in this series.

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Montreal’s first and last goals from Game 7 illustrate the point. Here’s a link to the NHL Video Center with highlights of last night’s scoring (I can’t find links directly to each goal), and in the meantime I’ll describe them as best as I can…

*On the first goal, it started when Boston goalie Tuuka Raask took a soft shot and just chipped it away to the side where a Montreal player was charging hard. I’ve watched a lot of Bruins’ hockey over the last few years, including most of this regular season. You never see Raask make a save that tentative. He either aggressively attacks the puck and sweeps it out, or he just covers it up.

When he just chipped it to an opposing player, my first thought was “Nothing good is going to come of this.” The puck was still deep, and then Boston defensemen Matt Bartkowski made another mental error, in failing to cover Dale Weise on the back side, who got a pass for an easy goal.

Boston simply gave this goal away, and it’s not sour grapes to say Montreal did nothing to earn it. The Canadiens’ credit comes from the fact they didn’t make a similar mistake. The contrast in mental mistakes was a recurring pattern throughout the series, and what it did was take what should have been a mismatch and make it an even series.

Even given all that, Boston might have survived, but they created a situation where the breaks of the game would decide it. On the third goal, the Bruins did everything correct, tracking Danny Briere all the way down the ice as he carried the puck. He fired the shot and it slipped into the net off the skate off Boston defenseman Zdeno Chara. This is nothing more than a bad break, plain and simple.

It’s the kind of break that went against the Bruins all series long. Their shots repeatedly hit the pipes, with even the commentators of NBC Sports Network making note of the close-but-no-cigar theme that seemed to dominate Boston. It’s bad luck, and that part of this series is indeed the way of life in the NHL playoffs.

The good news is that the nature of the NHL playoffs doesn’t mean that losing as a 1-seed is some horrible missed opportunity. Boston could have an adequate regular season next year, come in as a 4-seed and end up winning the Stanley Cup. That’s how it worked for the Detroit Red Wings, who lost as big favorites in 1995 and 1996. The next two years saw Detroit finish third in their conference and they won the Stanley Cup both times. Good organizations just keep putting themselves in position and under the leadership of GM Cam Neely, the Boston Bruins of today are certainly that.

But the Bruins also have to learn the lessons of this series. There is simply no room for mental errors in a series. There’s enough luck issues floating around in a hockey playoff series that a good team must control what it can. Boston didn’t do it and paid the price.

1978 Boston Bruins: A Team That Came Back For More But Not Quite Enough

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The 1978 Boston Bruins were coming off a year where they reached the Stanley Cup Finals, but were pounded decisively by their archrival, the Montreal Canadiens. The Bruins came back for more in 1978, and they did get a little bit more…but in the end it wasn’t quite enough.

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Boston’s 1978 team was one of the most balanced teams in the history of the NHL, becoming the first team to have 11 players score 20-plus goals. The leader was Peter McNab with 41, while Terry O’Reilly was the best all-around offensive threat, with 61 assists and a team-leading 90 points. O’Reilly was also an enforcer par excellence, and could have easily gotten a job as a capo in the Boston Irish mob if the hockey thing hadn’t worked out.

Jean Ratelle and defenseman Brad Park were also solid assist men, and physical winger Wayne Cashman was the team captain. The Bruins balance translated itself into consistency. They never lost more than two consecutive games, only did that on three occasions and two of them happened in the season’s first 20 games. Their record hit 48-14-9 on March 23, and the B’s coasted home to an Adams Division title, beating out Buffalo and Toronto, along with the Cleveland Barons (who through a series of mergers & moves are now a part of today’s Dallas Stars).

After a first-round bye, the Bruins rolled through best-of-seven series against Chicago and Philadelphia, losing only one game in the process and securing their berth in the Finals. The NHL did not bracket teams by conference at this time and everyone just went into a big 12-team melting pot at the end of the season, thus making it possible for the B’s to play a team from the East in the final. Montreal was the only team in hockey with a better regular season record than Boston and they also churned through their two playoff rounds at 8-1 to set up the rematch the Hub craved.

Montreal was coached by Scotty Bowman, at the outset of a career that has marked him one of the great NHL coaches of all time and they were led by right-winger Guy Lafleur, who holds a similar legendary status. Lafleur led the Canadiens in both goals and assists, giving them a single go-to player than the Bruins lacked. Montreal also had Ken Dryden in goal, a big advantage over Boston’s trio of Ron Graham, Giles Gilbert and Gerry Cheevers.

Playing at home, Montreal grabbed the first two games. Lafleur led the way in a decisive 4-1 win to open the series and then he scored the game winner in overtime of Game 2, a 3-2 final. The Bruins showed toughness though, and scored within the first minute of Game 3 back in Boston Garden and rolled to a 4-0 win.

In Game 4, Montreal looked ready to put a chokehold on the series, taking a 3-1 lead in the third period. Boston tied it, the tying goal scored by defenseman Brad Parks, who was solid throughout the Finals. The B’s won in overtime and an ecstatic city saw their team pull even at 2-2 and have momentum on their side.

If momentum in baseball is as good as your next day’s starting pitcher, then in hockey it’s as good as your goalie. Dryden stepped it up in the final two games. A pair of early goals in Game 5 set the tone for a 4-1 Montreal win. Game 6 in Boston saw Parks score the first goal, but Dryden to take over from there, and the Canadiens to again win 4-1.

It was a noble effort. The 1978 Boston Bruins were the second-best team in hockey, one with no quit in them and they’d played Montreal more competitively in this year’s Finals then had been the case in ’77. That doesn’t seem like enough when the best team is your rival and they celebrate in your building.

The Boston Bruins At The Olympic Break

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The Boston Bruins reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 2013 and came within a minute of reaching the seventh game. The Bruins won the Cup in 2011 and their goaltender, Tuuka Raask, has led Finland into the semi-finals of the Olympic tournament on Friday. Boston leads the Atlantic Division with a 37-16-4 record and trails only the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Eastern Conference overall.

Let’s take a look at how the B’s have put it together as we get set for the NHL to come out of the Olympic break this coming Tuesday.

Defense has been the Boston calling card throughout this run of contention that can be traced back to 2009. This year’s team is no different. Raask’s 92.8% save rate is fourth-best among NHL goalies. The team defense is good—10th in the league in shots allowed—and when you combine that with a great goaltender, you’re going to be hard to beat.


One thing Boston is not getting is a lot of offensive production from its defensemen. This isn’t the end of the world, as the Bruin defensemen have generally excelled at…well, defense. But normally you see someone like Zdeno Chara pile up the assist numbers and that hasn’t happened this year. Torey Krug, who took the playoffs by storm as a rookie last year, has been steady (12 goals/20 assists), but if Boston is to get past the league’s other elite teams, they’ll need at least a bit of offensive spice from the back line.


If you go through the Boston front line player-by-player, you would think this is a mediocre offense. There’s no one who’s reached 20 goals yet, no one with a huge number of assists, like Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby. What there is in Boston is exceptional balance.

Up and down the lineup, from Brad Marchand, to Milan Lucic at left wing, to David Krejci and Patrice Bergeron at center, to Jarome Iginla and Loui Eriksson at right wing, the Bruins have a whole lot of players who can be the hero of the night.

What this all adds up to is an offense that’s fifth in the NHL in goals scored, not far behind Pittsburgh’s more heralded attack. And what the entire package, from the balanced offense to the good defense to the elite goaltending, adds up to is a team that again has a chance to go very deep into the postseason come spring.