3 biggest reasons this Bruins season was not successful

It's the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day. These Boston Bruins are going to go down in history as the best regular season team of all time. But ultimately 2022-23 will not be seen as a success. I'm going to talk about three reasons why that's the case here on today's episode of Lockdown Boston Bruins. What is up Bruins fans and welcome back to the Lockdown Boston Bruins Podcast. I'm your host Ian McLaren and this is a daily show where we discuss all things Spoked Beat. Today is Thursday May 4th, Happy May 4th, Be To You or whatever. And I want to thank you so much for making Lockdown Boston Bruins part of your day every day. We are free and available wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube part of the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day. Oh boy, the second round of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs continue and our Boston Bruins are not part of it. And today I am going through three reasons why this season was not successful ultimately for the Boston Bruins. Before we get into that, a quick reminder that you can find the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at locked NHL Bruins and you can find me, my dad jokes and hockey tweets at ENC McLaren. Like I said, the Boston Bruins set records for wins and points in the regular season, but 2022-23 will always be seen as unsuccessful ultimately. And why is that? Well, for one thing, the president's trophy just simply isn't the Stanley Cup. This trophy was introduced in 1985 by the NHL's Board of Governors to be awarded to the team that finished with the most wins, most points in the regular season. Prior to that, fun fact, the best team in the NHL during the regular season was allowed to hang a banner that read NHL league champions. But again, despite setting records for wins and points, the Boston Bruins lost in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. So it's a failure ultimately. This isn't the English Premier League. Their league trophy is the ultimate prize that teams battle for over the course of 38 matches. The team that finishes at the top of the table, their league champions. So if you bring that over to the NHL, the Bruins the day they clinched the president's trophy by EPL standards, they would have been named league champions. The president's trophy just does not have that same prestige and the EPL does not have a season deciding tournament following the 38 matches they play in order to decide the league champion. The league champion is the team that finishes first. The Stanley Cup is more akin to the Champions League, which is one of the most prestigious football tournaments in the world and the most prestigious club competition in European football. It's played by all national league champions and for some nations like England, one or more of the runner-ups and they all come together. The best of the best clubs battle it out for Champions League supremacy. So while it's amazing for EPL teams to win the league, they want that further prestige of winning the Champions League, like the best of the best. So the Bruins finish first, they're the best among all 32 NHL teams, but being the best among the 16 that qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs is the ultimate goal. And that's why this season will not be seen as a success. The Bruins quite simply, it's not only that they didn't achieve their goal of winning the Stanley Cup, maybe we would have been okay with it if they had advanced to the second round and got knocked out by the Toronto Maple Leafs, so though honestly that still would have been really hard to swallow. Perhaps it wouldn't have been seen as a big of a failure if they get to the Eastern Conference finals and lose to a Caroline Hurricanes team that gave them trouble last season or a team on the rise like the New Jersey Devils. Still for me, that would have been a disappointment. Maybe it wouldn't have been seen as a failure if they get to the Stanley Cup final and lose to an Edmonton Oilers team that's loaded with the highest end talent or Dallas Stars team that's got an amazing balance of young players and veteran stars. Yeah, if they got to the Stanley Cup final and lost to Bruce Cassidy and the Vegas Golden Knights, that would have been a bitter pill to swallow it. If they made it to the final and lost like they did in 2019, still would have been a disappointment on successful. The fact that they finished so high in the standings and lost to a team that was 43 points behind them, even if they won the President's Trophy last year, had some issues through the regular season, just about as unsuccessful as you can get after winning the President's Trophy. And again, the President's Trophy just quite simply is not the Stanley Cup. So that's one reason why this season was not successful for the Boston Bruins. We'll talk about a couple more reasons coming up here after the break. But first, a quick word from today's sponsor, which is Bilt Bar. Now Bilt Bar is the best tasting protein bar on the market and it's also good for you. If you're like me and you like to make healthier snack choices but you don't want to compromise on taste, well Bilt Bar is for you. What makes them so good, they're covered in 100% real dark chocolate. They come in unbelievable flavors like churro, peanut butter, brownie, and cookies and cream. And they also have amazing stats. They're healthy for you, 130 calories, 4 grams of sugar, 17 grams of protein. You can get a box by going to built.com and ordering there. But now you can also go to your local Walmart or Sam's Club to get specialty flavors. That's right, head to nearest Walmart, walk up to the pharmacy section, grab a box of Bilt Bar or Sam's Club, 13 bar boxes with some hit flavors. Do a run today and thank me later. The following message was written by chatgpt. Get the inside scoop on everything NHL playoffs with Lockdawn NHL. Join our expert hosts as they break down the latest news, games, and predictions. From the hottest players to the biggest upsets, we've got you covered. Don't miss a beat this postseason, Lockdawn NHL. Available on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. Lockdawn Podcast Network, more team every day. And thank you once again for making Lockdawn Bruins part of your day every single day. Every day is tomorrow on the show. You can expect continued season in review. I'll be breaking down the three biggest reasons for hope going into next season. Right now we're still talking about why this season was not successful. And I think you can kind of pin some of this on head coach Jim Montgomery. He deserves a bit of criticism here for this failure in the playoffs. He had an amazing regular season. He's going to win the Jack Adams trophy. I have no doubt. But a lack of playoff experience may have come back to bite him here. And he was quite simply out coached by Paul Maurice in the playoffs. Paul Maurice has been around for quite some time and this was only Jim Montgomery's second appearance in the playoffs as an NHL head coach. He guided the Dallas Stars to the playoffs in 2019. They played 13 games, one, seven of them lost six. And then this year seven games, three wins with the Bruins, four losses. So he's got a 10 and 10 career playoff record. And he did make some questionable decisions in the playoffs, beginning with just relentlessly changing the lines. That's how Flute Ocean's out of the athletic describes it. And he admitted that to start game five, it was a mistake to split up Patrice Bergeron and Brad Mershahn. He began that game with Bergeron centering Bertuzzi and Pasternak, just a trio that had not played together at all. It didn't really make any sense for that to be a line. And Bertuzzi, yes, he played great, but he was careless with the pocket times. And he set up a Carter Verhage goal early in game five. For game five, he just really shuffled things up and down the whole lineup. And that was a mistake. Keeping Derek forboard in the lineup was also a mistake. He was left in there because of his prowess on the penalty kill. The Bruins were not as good killing penalties against the Panthers as they were during the regular season. Forboard could not keep up with their speed. And he was a liability out there. Unfortunately, in game six, the decision was made to replace Matt Grizzly with Connor Clifton. And he just had a terrible game in game six straight up. He took a charging penalty. He had some turnovers. He was caught below the goal line prior to Zack Dalpe's tying goal in the third. I've said that the Bruins looked like they were a team playing too afraid to make a mistake, too afraid to cough up this opportunity. And Connor Clifton in game six was a perfect example of that. So keeping foreboard in the lineup, bringing Grizzlyk in and out, he should have been a mainstay on the blue line throughout the whole series. Even if you want to keep foreboard in, you have to play Matt Grizzlyk and maybe swing between Clifton and foreboard, but that was a mistake on Jim Montgomery's part. There were some other weird decisions. You scratch Tran Frederick, bring in Jacob Lauco, that really backfired. You bring Tran Frederick back for game seven, but you scratch Nick Felino. It's kind of reminiscent to scratching David Bacchus in game seven of the 2019 final in favor of Carson Coolman. You could say Coolman, yeah, he scored a game in a goal in game six. He had more speed, but there's just something to having a guy like that in the room for these high pressure games. You can't tell me looking back that David Bacchus wouldn't have played with all of his heart out there in a game seven of the Stanley Cup final against the team that he used to captain. It's the same here with Nick Felino. You could have used his presence on the bench and in the room in game seven. We look back to his winter classic speech and how he helped regulate things. His teammates regularly credited him for his command and sense of the moment. Tran Frederick didn't really help his teammates much in game seven. And he was out of there on the ice when some games were scored. Frederick had zero goals, zero points in the series. The only forward not to score in the series, whereas Felino had one goal, two assists in six games. I'm not saying Frederick shouldn't have been out on the ice, but having Felino's leadership and he contributed in this series, having that out there could have helped the Bruins in game seven. The other costly mistake was scrapping the goalie rotation or at least not giving Jeremy Swamin some playing time before game seven. And we'll talk about that in a moment. First another quick thank you for making locked on Bruins part of your day every single day. Again, every day listeners can expect full coverage of the fallout from the first round loss and all the corresponding decisions, moves, comments tomorrow, specifically on the show will do the three biggest reasons for hope heading into next season. The Tampa Bay Rays are for real this season and they just swept one of the best teams in baseball to prove it. The Warriors bounced back in game two against the Lakers. Can they keep this momentum going as the series heads to LA and just like that, it's a best of five and the Vegas Golden Knights are looking to build on a high scoring game one victory in their second round series against Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers. For all these stories head over to locked on Rays locked on Warriors and locked on Golden Knights then check out locked on's new series, Paving the Way. Each episode will highlight a different voice from around the network, a locked on host whose journey in the industry has helped pave the way toward creating a more inclusive and diverse media landscape. As Paving the Way presented by Stateform available now on the locked on presents podcast feed. One of the reasons why the Boston Bruins are not playing anymore is that the goal tending fell apart at the worst possible time. Inus Olmarch had a season that will likely earn him the Vessna Trophy. He finished first in the NHL in wins, save percentage and goals against average. In the postseason however, a precipitous dip in production. He started six games. He went three and three, three 34 goals against average which was well down or well up I should say from his 1.89 regular season mark. In a save percentage was 896, well down from his mark of 938. Now there was a report of course that he was dealing with a debilitating and painful injury that via Kevin Weeks of ESPN. Game 6 especially he looked like a fish out of water just flailing this way in that rebound control was not there. Swamin should have been put in the series much earlier than he was. To ask him to go in, starting him in game 7 was the right decision based on how Olmarch played in game 6. But asking him to go in there in that high pressure situation and lock things down is a big ask for a 24 year old. He should have gotten the start in game 5 when the Bruins were up 3-1. To keep that rotation going or at the very least he should have gotten the start in game 6 after lienus Olmarch had that disastrous turnover in overtime in game 5. That would have given him a lower pressure situation and would also have gotten him some game action so that if they decided to start him again in game 7 he was already feeling comfortable out there or if Olmarch was banged up give him that rest between games 5 and game 7 in order to be fresh. I can see why they wanted to go with their best option from the regular season but you have a capable goaltender in Jeremy Swamin there and it's inexcusable not to go with him especially if Olmarch was banged up and Jim Montgomery, goalie coach Bob Essenso have a lot to answer for here. While Montgomery's post season media availability has not happened yet Bob Essenso has not been made available for comment and we'll see what happens. Lienus Olmarch was quick to not put it on anybody saying they lose as a team he didn't want to say what his injury was or how the decision was made. Jim Montgomery said they thought Swamin was going to give them the best chance in game 7 and you have to ask Olie Bob a little more in detail about that which is an interesting comment kind of passing the buck there. Ultimately he is the head coach he has the final say and Jeremy Swamin should have been in the net earlier so that's one of the reasons why this season was unsuccessful specifically in the playoffs the goal tending just disappeared. Again it's a full team game the Bruins should have done better to help their goalies. There were some catastrophic turnovers in game 2 specifically game 5 game 6 game 7. Ultimately the reason why this season is not successful is because the president's trophy is not the Stanley Cup and they fell far far short of their goal this season. Is all lost? No there's reasons to look ahead to next season and feel hopeful even if Brad Marshon sorry even if David Craycian Patrice Bergeron are not around there's a great article up on the athletic today from Shannon Goldman that you want to check out the Bruins still should be as competitive as can be next season even if Bergeron and Craycian are not in the mix maybe not best all time regular season but still a playoff team to I don't want to say to be sure but they should be a playoff team even with the guys that are in the lineup. So that's it those are three reasons why this season is not successful tomorrow we'll talk about three reasons for hope going into next season and we continue to personally deal with the disappointment of this loss and we press on. I hope you're all taking care of yourselves taking care of each other doing some things to enjoy yourselves I'm reading some good books watching some good shows the other two is back which is one of my favorites and rewatching friends for some reason what else are we watching love and death is pretty entertaining succession Mrs. Davis I love Barry Dave a lot of good options out there to keep your mind off hockey as we continue to discuss this still shocking loss anyways friends thank you so much again for tuning in to locked on Boston Bruins please do become an everyday listener if you're not already and we will talk to you again here tomorrow on locked on Boston Ruins part of the locked on podcast network your favorite team every single day. Buying tickets to see your favorite NHL team shouldn't be stressful that's where game time comes in game time is the place for last minute ticket deals forget planning months in advance game time has deals on tickets right up to the day of the event get images of your seat before you buy so you know exactly what to expect when you arrive you can buy tickets in a matter of seconds two taps in your set download the game time app great an account and use the code locked on NHL for twenty dollars off your first purchase terms apply again redeem code locked on NHL for twenty dollars off download game time today last minute tickets lowest price guaranteed the Tampa Bay Rays are for real this season and they just swept one of the best teams in baseball to prove it the pirates they have not run into a buzz saw a team like the Rays and I think it got to them the Warriors bounced back in game two against the Lakers can they keep this momentum going as the series heads to LA and just like that it's a best of five and the Vegas Golden Knights are looking to build on a high scoring game one victory in their second round series against Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers that's the way this team had played back in the inaugural season in the playoffs for all these stories head over to locked on Rays locked on Warriors and locked on Golden Knights then check out locked on's new series paving the way each episode will highlight a different voice from around the network a locked on host whose journey in the industry has helped pave the way for creating a more inclusive and diverse media landscape that's paving the way presented by State Farm available now on the locked on presents podcast feed a prime members you can listen to this locked on podcast add free on Amazon music download the Amazon music app today Hey.