Going all the way back to June when coach Bruce Cassidy suggested that there could be “some sort of preseason mentality” in the round-robin tournament, it was clear that the Bruins were not going to be treating those games as true playoff games, or even particularly meaningful games.
From the top down, the message was clear: Sure, they wanted to win and get the highest seed possible, but the most important things would be building up their game for the real playoffs and staying healthy.
Now that they finished the round-robin with an 0-3 record (0-4 if you count their exhibition game) and dropped from the No. 1 seed to the No. 4 seed, the Bruins have been striking an even more dismissive tone when it comes to the importance of wins and losses in those games.
After Sunday’s 2-1 loss to the Capitals, goalie Tuukka Rask referred to them as “round-robin games or whatever they were” and said that now they were starting “real hockey,” suggesting the round-robin was not in fact “real hockey.”
Forward Brad Marchand took things a step further Monday, calling them “preseason games” that didn’t matter.
“What we've gone through the last four games, it doesn't really mean anything,” Marchand said. “We're not gonna look at it and base the next series off of what's happened. Those are preseason games, let's call it what it is. They're exhibition games for the playoffs. We weren't in the same position as other teams. It's hard to have the same mentality as a playoff series.”
No one has used the cliché term “flip the switch,” but it’s clear that the Bruins think that’s exactly what they’re going to be able to do. And they better be right.
If the Bruins fall behind early in their first-round series against the Hurricanes that begins Tuesday night and wind up making a first-round exit, it’s going to be very easy to look back and say that they got their approach to all of this completely wrong.
If teams like the Flyers and Golden Knights who brought more intensity to the round-robin and won their respective conference’s top seeds look more playoff-ready and make deeper runs, it’s going to be clear which approach was the right one.
While the Bruins don’t want to admit it, they have made this postseason harder on themselves. Seeding may be less important in the NHL than other sports, especially this year with no home-ice advantages, but matchups could still matter, and the B’s now have the toughest one that was on the table.
The Hurricanes looked great in their three-game sweep of the Rangers in the play-in round, and they looked like a team that wasn’t far off from where they had been in the regular season. And what they were in the regular season was better than the Islanders, Blue Jackets and Canadiens, the other three teams that advanced out of the Eastern Conference play-in round.
The Hurricanes were the only one of those four teams that had a positive goal differential in the regular season, and they were a plus-29. They were the only one that averaged more than three goals per game, as they were 11th in the NHL at 3.19. They were also the only one of those four that ranked in the top 10 in the league in either power play (eighth at 22.3%) or penalty kill (fourth at 84%). In short, they’re the most complete, most dangerous team, and the one with the most ways to beat you.
Then if the Bruins get past the Hurricanes and there are no other upsets in the first round, they would have to face the white-hot Flyers in the second round instead of a banged-up Lightning squad or a Capitals team with questions on defense and in goal.
Rask said Sunday that “you have to beat every team anyways,” but that is quite literally not true. You could beat a worse team than the Hurricanes instead of having to beat the Hurricanes. You could also put off a series with the Flyers until the conference finals and increase the chances that someone else knocks them off or that they get banged up and weakened.
Maybe the Bruins will show they got this right. Maybe the incremental improvements they made throughout the round-robin will be enough and they will be able to flip that switch and start playing like the team that won the Presidents’ Trophy and looked poised to make another deep playoff run.
But if they got it wrong and there is no switch and they’re not ready to compete at a playoff level, then a lot of people -- from team management to Cassidy and his staff to the team’s veteran leaders -- are going to have a lot of tough questions to answer about why that happened.
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