There’s been a lot of speculation about whether the Red Sox’s dismal play over their last road trip is related to their inactivity at the trade deadline. Former Bruins goaltender Andrew Raycroft, who went through a few deadlines in his day, says he thinks the two are correlated.
On “The Greg Hill Show” Monday, Raycroft, who was filling in for Jermaine Wiggins, relayed a story about how the Bruins’ late-season acquisitions of Sergei Gonchar and Michael Nylander in 2004 instilled confidence in the team eading into the playoffs.
“They made that deal at the deadline. We thought we were good, but we were like, ‘Eh, you know,’” Raycroft said. “But the organization made those deals, and the next day I remember going to the rink like, ‘This is it. We’re going to the Finals. Let’s go.’ We could’ve been that Red Sox team where if that deal doesn’t get done and nothing happens, and the Montreal Canadians or Toronto Maple Leafs make that deal, we could’ve gone in and been like, ‘Wow, they don’t believe in us whatsoever.”
The Bruins went on a run following the ’04 deadline, winning nine of their last 15 games. They wound up taking the Canadians to seven games in the quarterfinals.
The Red Sox, meanwhile, have dropped eight of their last 10 games. They’re now four games behind Tampa Bay in the AL East and only 2.5 games up on the Yankees for the second wild card. The Jays, who took three of four from the Red Sox this weekend, are only three games off the pace.
While some regression to the mean was expected — the Red Sox went 9-9 from July 5 through July 29 — they’ve played like a hapless team over the last week and a half.
For Raycroft, the drop-off is too extreme to ignore.
“Yes, they might have been playing over their head, but I think they believed in themselves as a group,” he said. “It seems as though the way it’s gone since that deadline is they don’t believe in themselves the same way as they did prior.”
