This outcome was always in the cards. We talked about it on the day the Boston Bruins, the best team in the history of hockey, started their Stanley Cup playoff run. The Bruins had won more games and posted more points than any team ever, but hockey is especially cruel about pulling up drawbridges on its best teams. It was always likelier than not that these winners of 65 regular-season games would win fewer than the requisite 16 playoff games to lift the Cup. Failing to win it all would not mean humiliation.
Losing in the first round does, though, and the Bruins have now done that. They have supplanted the 2019 Tampa Bay Lightning, who totaled a league-best 128 points in 2019 before suffering a first-round sweep, as the saddest Presidents’ Trophy winners ever. The killshot came on Sunday night. The Bruins had led their series against the eighth-seeded Florida Panthers 3 games to 1, but they’d let the Panthers crawl back. They had led this game 3 goals to 2, scoring three in a row after falling down a pair early. It didn’t matter, as the Panthers tied the game in the last minute of regulation and won it in overtime when Carter Verhaeghe beat Jeremy Swayman on a long-windup wrist shot from the right faceoff dot:
Before the playoffs, there were three paths available to the Bruins: Win and be immortalized in a way that transcends even the usual pageantry of having your names etched on the Cup. Lose and be sad, but acknowledge that shit happens and great teams can play well and bow out at some point. Or lose and be a bit of a laughingstock, because you lost to the Florida Panthers in the first round. They chose ignominy.
Of course, that’s not really fair to the 2022–23 Panthers, who are good and showed a lot of mettle by winning two overtime games in Boston and battling all the way back. This team has shown up in the playoffs four years in a row and is not the bottom-feeder that you associate with the words “Florida Panthers,” said in that order. But the Panthers were an eight-seed’s eight seed, or at least seemed that way entering the playoffs. They totaled 92 points, a very eight-seed amount. They have two real stars in winger Matthew Tkachuk and center Aleksander Barkov, which is better than most eighth seeds, but they also have some dudes who should not be on the ice for a competitive NHL team. (Defenseman Marc Staal is best suited to work as a traffic cone.) Their franchise goaltender, Sergei Bobrovsky, ceased to be a franchise goaltender and found himself benched for journeyman backup Alex Lyon.
The Bruins had a bug going around their locker room as the series started, and their iconic center Patrice Bergeron played only three games as he mended a back injury. David Krejči, another veteran center and good player, missed the series’ middle three games. This was a reduced form of the Bruins. But they were not exactly ripe for the taking against these Panthers, who looked overwhelmed a few times. Lyon got benched after letting in three goals apiece in the first three games, two of them losses. Bobrovsky returned, but Boston still scored at least three in every game. That is rarely not enough scoring to win a playoff series, and it verges on unfathomable that it wasn’t enough for this year’s Bruins, who were a goal-prevention dynamo all year. During the season, they let up nearly half a goal fewer per game than the league’s next-stingiest team. Boston had not one of the league’s best goalies (forthcoming Vezina Trophy winner Linus Ullmark), but two (also Swayman, the backup who outplayed all but a few other teams’ starters).
Intermittently, Ullmark turned into a pumpkin in this series. Coach Jim Montgomery wavered on replacing him for a while, making the move only after Ullmark let in four goals on 25 shots in a Game 5 overtime loss and then six goals on 32 shots in Game 6. Montgomery went to Swayman for Game 7, and the result was not good. Shot-tracking data says Swayman let in one goal more than he should’ve, per MoneyPuck, and human eyeballs also tell you that. Florida’s first goal was a light backhander off a rush that got between Swayman’s legs. The game-tying goal got through from a bad angle near the boards. The overtime winner was a great shot from distance. Nothing was embarrassing, but goaltending is about making saves on the margins, and Swayman, coming in cold, couldn’t make enough. Montgomery will have to wear it that whatever his goaltending strategy was in this series, it didn’t work.
But it wasn’t just the goaltending. The Bruins got outskated in the last three games of the series. They looked disjointed in their puck movement after a season of avoiding sloppiness. That’s also at least in part on the head coach, who just took the job this season and had fewer messes to clean up than just about any NHL coach has ever had. When they arose in this series, Boston didn’t respond.
There are no silver linings for the Bruins, but there also should not be big changes. They are so good, and the playoffs are so weird, that there is not a clear thing the Bruins could plan out better in the offseason ahead. The Toronto Maple Leafs stayed the course last year after repeatedly smashing their faces into a piece of glass that sat between them and the second round, and now they’ve advanced and might even be the Eastern Conference favorite. The Lightning of 2019, who suffered that horrendous sweep after their own best-in-show season, held on to their coach and their best players and immediately won two Cups in a row. This loss is so horrible that the Bruins can only cry, then take a deep swallow, and stay the course.
