Less than a month ago, on Jan. 20, the Mut at Night show tweeted an Inauguration Day-themed poll: Which Boston team is most likely to win a championship over the next four years?
The options were the four "major" teams. Apologies to the Revolution, Pride, Cannons and the local college hockey teams, any of whom could certainly beat the big four to the punch.
The results: 52.6% said the Celtics, 23% the Bruins, 15.7% the Patriots, and 8.8% the Red Sox.
It made perfect sense… on Jan. 20. Less than a month later, the discussion has completely changed. It's obvious which of the four teams is closest to winning a title right now, and it's not the Celtics.
It's the Bruins. If we ran this poll again right now, they'd win it in a runaway, possibly by an even bigger margin than the Celtics won it then.
It's crazy to think about how much has changed in just one month -- both in terms of how the Bruins and Celtics have been playing and in terms of how we feel about their futures.
On Jan. 20, the Bruins were off to an uninspiring 1-1-1 start and had yet to score a five-on-five goal. Many of us (I can admit I was in this group) thought they were going in the wrong direction after an offseason that saw them lose Zdeno Chara and Torey Krug and not make any big splashes. We thought their "championship window" may very well have closed.
Since then, the Bruins have gone 9-1-1. They now have the second-best record in the NHL and they have a four-point lead atop their division. They're not a perfect finished product by any means, and we know they'll have to prove themselves in the playoffs, but it would be foolish to think they can't compete for the Stanley Cup this season. If you're one of the three-to-five best teams in the league -- and right now they are -- you have a chance.
And if they can move on from Chara and Krug and remain contenders while retooling on the fly, then perhaps they can keep their window open for a few more years. David Krejci and Tuukka Rask could be the next veteran departures as both are free agents after this season, but their departures would also free up a good chunk of money that could be used to help replace them.
The Celtics, meanwhile, were off to an encouraging 8-4 start on Jan. 20. They were tied with the Bucks and 76ers for first in the Eastern Conference, had just gotten Kemba Walker back, and were on the verge of getting Jayson Tatum back after his stay on the COVID-19 list. We were thinking they could compete for a championship this season. Maybe that trade exception they got for Gordon Hayward could land them the one piece that could put them over the top.
Since then, the Celtics have gone 5-9 to drop to .500 on the season and slide down to fifth in the conference, 4.5 games behind the first-place Sixers. They're 4-7 since Tatum returned and 2-4 in games that Tatum, Walker and Jaylen Brown have all played, including most recently a 13-point loss to the last-place Wizards on Sunday. Yes, Marcus Smart has missed the last eight games and that's certainly a factor, but regardless, there's no way you can feel good after a weekend of losing to Washington and Detroit.
The Celtics don't look like a championship contender right now, and it doesn't feel like they're one trade exception player away either. At the risk of overreacting to a bad stretch, it seems like it's going to take something bigger to get them into the conversation with the Bucks and Nets (and maybe the Sixers depending on how much you buy them) in the East, never mind the defending champion Lakers from the West (or the Jazz, Clippers or someone else who's good enough to knock off the Lakers).
The sky is the ceiling for Tatum and Brown, and they're still a damn good foundation to build on, but this season is serving as a reminder that there is still some real building that needs to be done.
For the other two teams in the poll, little has changed since Jan. 20. The conversation about when the Patriots might next be a Super Bowl contender can't even start until we know what their plan is at quarterback. And with talk recently about a Cam Newton return and/or a trade for Marcus Mariota, we should at least start to brace ourselves for the possibility that we're going to be disappointed by Bill Belichick's QB plan for at least another year.
The Red Sox' most significant move since then -- trading Andrew Benintendi -- made them worse in the short-term. Until they start to make real, serious win-now moves, it's hard to think a World Series is anywhere close to being within reach.
Full disclosure: I said back on Jan. 20 that the Red Sox might be my sneaky No. 2 in that poll, just because under this ownership, they have been able to turn things over and build World Series teams every five years or so. But if they're in the middle of that turnover from the 2018 World Series team, then they're still two or three years away, at minimum. And despite what it's sometimes felt like around here over the last 20 years, there actually is no guarantee you win a title just because you have a good team.
On that point, there's no guarantee the Bruins win a title this year, next year, or at any time before another Boston team. But they're clearly the closest of the four right now, and all it's taken is one month for our collective opinion of both them and the Celtics to completely flip.
