BRIGHTON – Things most definitely feel a little different about the Boston Bruins headed into the NHL regular season.
The last couple of seasons the Bruins were introducing young players into their lineup and the expectations were pretty modest. Making the playoffs was the true goal after missing the postseason cut for a couple of years in a row, and playing hard every night, or most nights anyway, was a habit the Bruins were trying to get back into after those two aforementioned lost seasons at the end of the Claude Julien era.
Well, the ante has gone up for the Black and Gold this season, and that’s a very good thing. Coming off a 112-point regular season and a trip to the second round of the playoffs before their untimely demise in five games to the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Bruins expect to be in the playoffs and plan on being in the Stanley Cup conversation.
They know that anything less than an improvement on last season will be a disappointment, and that means the bar is higher than it’s been in five years for the Bruins. Put another way, they are not going to be sneaking up on anybody this season as one of three powerhouse hockey teams in the Atlantic Division.
“Well, we are not going to be surprising anybody anymore. It’s one of those things where they’re going to be ready for us and we have to be ready for them. We’re in a top division. Every team got better,” said Zdeno Chara. “We’ve got to play to our strength and our identity and battle it out. We know the importance of a good start and we’re definitely looking forward to all of the challenges.”
It will be interesting to see how the Bruins react to bigger, better expectations from the fans, from the coaches, from management, from ownership and even from themselves. Certainly, there will be more pressure on players like Charlie McAvoy, Jake DeBrusk, Danton Heinen, Matt Grzelcyk and Ryan Donato to be even better than they were last season. It’s always easier to be the scrappy underdog than a hockey team that’s expected to get to 100 points in their sleep, and is expected to be in lockstep with Tampa Bay and Toronto throughout the season.
Boston Bruins
“I definitely think so,” said Bruce Cassidy, when asked if the stakes have been raised this season. “The year we had I thought we…you pick the word. Some people said we overachieved. I don’t know if we feel that way internally. We feel like we’ve got a good hockey club and we felt like we were a playoff team, and from there we didn’t know where we would go.
“We won a round and then lost a series that we felt going in that we had as good a chance as the opposition. This year I think more people are talking about the Bruins being a Stanley Cup contender this season than they were last year, quite simply. That raises the expectations, which is good. You want to have a level of pressure on you to perform, and you want to be considered a good team. So I think our guys should embrace it. I certainly am.”
Beyond the understandable pressure on the young players in their sophomore seasons, there’s also the simple fact that the window is probably closing for this current group of B’s players. Patrice Bergeron is 33 years old and has missed chunks of time in each of the last couple of seasons. Zdeno Chara is on the wrong side of 40 years old and is that portion of his career where things could drop off for him pretty quickly despite his elite stamina and legendary conditioning regime. Brad Marchand is 30 years old and entering the back end of his prime, and there already appears to be some regression to David Krejci’s game.
The core group still left over from the Stanley Cup years isn’t getting any younger, and there will start to be diminishing returns on what they can give if the Bruins don’t have a Cup run in them within the next couple of seasons. Add that to the pressure of living up to last season’s breakthroughs, and there’s quite a bit riding on this Bruins team that just sailed through their eight-game preseason schedule with a giant overseas trip to China in the middle of it.
It certainly isn’t going to be easy for the Black and Gold this season, but that’s the way they want to have it. The added pressure and raised expectations mean they’ve been doing quite a few things right in the last couple of seasons. Now comes the toughest part in going from legit playoff team to legit Stanley Cup contender, and that’s the tricky spot the Bruins find themselves as the puck drops on another NHL season on Wednesday night in Washington DC.