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A playoff CV like that undoubtedly would raise the roof and cause fans to party all night long in Buffalo, where the Sabres haven’t qualified for the playoffs since 2011, a mind-boggling 13-year span. The same would be true in San Jose, Columbus or Ottawa, a trio of the NHL’s perennial tomato cans.
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Nonetheless, those results are hard to stomach here in the Hub of Hockey, where the TD Garden’s pricey seats fill up every night, and fans year after year invest wallet, soul, and psyche in their beloved skaters and shooters. The faithful keep coming despite the stark reality that 2011 remains the franchise’s lone Cup title since 1972.
The last 6-7 regular seasons have been consistently fun, entertaining, and spiced up now and then with just enough of what passes as excitement in today’s tamer, bucket-of-blood-free NHL. But the playoffs? Not so much. Certainly not what the fandom here is looking for.
“It was all too predictable,” one fan, David Barnes, e-mailed to your faithful puck chronicler some 12 hours after the loss to Florida. “Sometimes it feels like 2011 never happened.”
Stanley Cup time has turned into a litany of buzzkill drills on Causeway Street. Twenty-four months ago, a Round 1 knockout by the Hurricanes, the third in a series of letdowns, led to the dismissal of popular and successful coach Bruce Cassidy.
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It’s possible now that the same could happen to Jim Montgomery, who has wrung out better results than his predecessor in Games 1-82 the past two seasons, but has delivered less, and sometimes appeared befuddled, at the time when the fan base is aching for more.
General manager Don Sweeney in June 2022, explaining Cassidy’s heave-ho: “I felt we left something on the table.”
It’s now impossible, after back-to-back playoff shooings by the Panthers, in the wake of two outstanding regular seasons, for Sweeney and team president Cam Neely not to feel the same today. When expectations are pegged so high by results October-April, the fall is harder in May and June.
That’s not to guarantee or advocate for Montgomery being shown the door. But his job has to be considered as vulnerable as the Bruins’ power play that delivered 1-for-16 results over the six games against the Panthers. The man-advantage struggled for great stretches during the regular season, too, with Montgomery and staff never able to provide a firm, sustainable fix.
Despite a strong start to this postseason (6 for 13 in Games 1-4 vs. Toronto), the power play petered out altogether these last three weeks (1 for 20 in the last nine games).
Coaches are paid to find remedies. None found. The power play, in fact, became more of a liability than a potential asset as the six games played out with the Panthers. Zone entries were poor. The Panthers also repeatedly made easy clears (seven during one two-minute power play in Game 5) and often developed threatening shorthanded attempts.
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There also was the Bruins’ embarrassing, almost-comical penchant for getting caught pants down with too many men on the ice. It happened again Friday night, the bench going dead in the head yet again, tagged with a seventh too-many-men penalty. In the league’s 100-plus-year history, no team ever before got flagged seven times for that in the postseason.
“Too many,” Bob Beers, The Sports Hub’s superb color analyst, blurted out when it happened again in Game 6. “A broken record.”
The Bruins used “Blood, Sweat & 100 years” as the title to their celebratory centennial tome this season. The addendum will have to be, “Blood, Sweat, 100 Years & Too Many Men.”
Just as a power play gone fallow can’t be pinned entirely on the coach, the same is true with regard to repeated bench boo-boos. However, they have to be added straws to the pile for Sweeney and Neely to consider when determining if Montgomery is their guy going forward. It could be the straws have become one too many.
No date has been announced, but Neely and Sweeney, the latter of whom took over the GM’s chair in 2015, are expected to hold their end-of-season press conference by mid- or late week. Prior to that, the players will gather at their practice facility at 9 a.m. Sunday for the annual lockers-and-lamentations exit day.
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The club’s biggest, most consistent bugaboo, be it with Cassidy or Montgomery calling the shots behind the bench: the inability to generate and finish offensive chances.
Year after year, they have lacked the personnel to set up and manufacture a sufficient number of Grade A scoring chances. They’ve repeatedly failed to cash in the few they have manufactured. Then they pack up and go home.
Cassidy routinely labeled it a failure to gain “inside ice.” Now he’s on the outside, albeit with the Cup title he won last June with Vegas, and the inside issues haven’t gone anywhere other than worse.
Never was the club’s overall failure in offensive output more glaring than in the 4-2 series loss to Florida. The Panthers averaged 27 more shot attempts per game (440-276) and more than a dozen shots on net per game (203-130). They dramatically outscored the Bruins, 18-8, in Games 2-6.
“You know,” a somber Montgomery said when it was all over, “you can’t win every game, 2-1.”
Not enough finish, lamented Montgomery, while noting that there were added reasons for the failure. It’s always more complex than the other team just scored more goals. But ultimately, math dictates.
“I’ll probably have more intelligent answers for you,” a sincere Montgomery noted to the media during his postgame presser, “than going off my vapid brain right now.”
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com.
