Bruins Entering Season In a New Class of Competition

You often hear that the Boston Bruins have a certain level of expectations for themselves.

They expect to win.

They expect to be in the playoffs.

They expect to compete for championships.

It’s a standard that’s well deserved. After all, no other team in the league has won more games or made more trips to the postseason over the last 20 years than they have.

They’ve developed fierce and bitter rivalries in that time, regularly squaring off with the likes of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning, and the Florida Panthers in intense playoff series year after year.

The difference entering this year is those teams can still expect to make the postseason.

All the Bruins can do is merely hope. They don’t have many reasons to.

After missing the playoffs for the first time in nine years last season, a return doesn’t seem all that likely entering 2025-26. Nor does the idea that matchups against their aforementioned rivals will be as meaningful, as much as the team will say otherwise.

No, the Bruins are in a new class of competition this year, somewhere between the cellar dwellers and the mushy middle.

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Rather than the Leafs, Lightning and Panthers, Boston’s most important matchups this season will come against teams such as the Red Wings, Blue Jackets, Sabres, Flyers, Penguins, and the Islanders.

It’s not exactly elite competition, but the Bruins aren’t an elite team, either.

Last season, Boston had a combined record of 9-8-2 against those opponents, and suffered some of their most disparaging losses.

An embarrassing 5-1 defeat at the hands of Columbus in mid-November was the final nail in Jim Montgomery’s coffin. The Bruins fired him the next day. It didn’t make a difference.

A few weeks later, at home on Black Friday, they fell 2-1 to a Pittsburgh team that had allowed a combined 47 goals across its previous 11 games. In January, a trip to Buffalo ended with a lifeless 7-2 result in which the Bruins allowed not one, but two Sabres to net hat tricks.

If the Bruins are going to have any chance of returning to the playoffs this season, those are the games they must win. Even then, that may still not be enough, but it will show that last year’s catastrophe was nothing more than an anomaly.

Those kinds of seasons have become the expectation elsewhere around the league.

Detroit, Hockey Town, was once the gold standard of consistency and success. It hasn’t seen the postseason in nine years.

In Pittsburgh, the glory of winning back-to-back Stanley Cups a decade ago is a faded memory. At least it’s still a memory. Whereas, in Buffalo, they’ve begun to forget the meaning of the word ‘playoffs’ altogether.

The Bruins are far from reaching that point, but not as far it once seemed.

Just like winning, losing is contagious. Too much time spent outside the postseason picture, it will begin to feel as if the Bruins are stuck there permanently.

If you can’t beat them, join them.