It’s a city that has become accustomed to winning with all of their sports teams. The Boston Celtics are a recent NBA champion and are coming off a season in which they made the finals. The New England Patriots have been a model of consistency in the NFL under Bill Belichick and the Boston Red Sox are always going to be in the mix because of the out-of-whack economic system in Major League Baseball.
The one team in the Boston area that has not lived up to the winning expectations is the Boston Bruins. After a season in which they were eliminated by the Philadelphia Flyers in 7 games despite having a 3-0 series lead, how do the Bruins rebound from such a big disappointment?
It won’t be easy when the roster is fully healthy, but with reports suggesting that their number one centreman Marc Savard may miss as much as the full 2010-2011 season due to post-concussion syndrome, their task will be that much harder. Savard would be a huge help since he scored 33 points in only 41 games last season.
Boston needs all the offensive help they can get since they were second-last in the NHL in goals scored. Their leading scorers from a year ago were David Krejci and Patrice Bergeron with 52 points each. That’s simply not good enough.
There can be an interesting debate about the forwards for the Bruins because a lot of them had career years a couple of years ago in order for them to win the Eastern Conference. However, many of these same over-achieving forwards regressed last season to make the Bruins one of the worst offensive teams in the NHL. So, the question has to be asked: How many of these forwards are capable of repeating their career years and how many of them had years that will just be aberrations to what will be otherwise normal NHL careers?
Defensively, they are led by their Norris-trophy anchor, Zdeno Chara, but unlike past years, there seems to be a changing of the guard with young guys taking on big-time roles. They will have to hope that guys ike Johnny Boychuk, Matt Hunwick and Adam McQuaid can handle the extra responsibilities.
The goaltending seems to be set with Tuukka Rask coming off a career year in which his GAA was 1.97 and he stopped 93% of all shots taken. However, didn’t we say this last year with Tim Thomas? Not suggesting that Rask is going to drop off like Thomas did, but just pointing out how things ended up.
Two players to watch out for in camp are Thomas and Tyler Seguin. Thomas is the back-up for this club, but you don’t usually have a former Vezina winner, an older guy and a well-paid guy as your backup. How much longer does Tim Thomas wear a Boston uniform? We haven’t even talked about the second overall pick from this year’s draft, but the question is simple: How much of an impact does he have with this team? We haven’t heard much about him during training camp like we have other rookies.