Are the 2022-23 Boston Bruins the Best Hockey Team Ever?
Maybe. Ask me again if they win the Stanley Cup.
With the Washington Capitals eliminated from playoff contention, there would normally be little reason to watch them play out the regular season on a Tuesday night. But that night’s opponent, the Boston Bruins, were on the verge of making some hockey history. With a win they would set a new NHL team record for regular season points with 133, passing the record of 132 set by the Montreal Canadiens during the 1976-77 NHL season.
The Bruins didn’t muck around, defeating the Caps, 5-2, and bagging the record with a game to spare before the end of the 82-game schedule. I’ve watched plenty of the Bruins this season and they are as good as advertised (how the Caps managed to beat them 2-1 in February in Boston, I’ll never know). They are second in the league in scoring with 300 goals (behind only the Edmonton Oilers), but have yielded the fewest in the league with just 173, giving them a goal differential of +127. The closest team to them is the New Jersey Devils at +64, a little more than half as good as the Bruins.
Can the gap between Boston and the rest of the NHL be that wide? The closest team to them in points is the Metropolitan Division leading Carolina Hurricanes with 111 — a gap of 11 wins over an 82 game regular season. So yes, they are that much better. That they’ve managed this in the NHL’s salary cap era while being led by Jim Montgomery, a head coach in his first year with the team and only his third year as an NHL head coach overall, is all the more astonishing.
But it’s going to take some convincing to get me to concede that as good as this Boston team is, and they are very, very good, that they are anywhere near as good as the team whose record they just snatched, the aforementioned 1976-77 Canadiens.
If you’re old enough, you don’t need to be reminded of the names from that roster: Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, Serge Savard, Ken Dryden, Jacques Lemaire, Steve Shutt and Bob Gainey. They were led by the incomparable Scotty Bowman, the architect of more Stanley Cup championships than any other coach in the history of the league.
Between 1968 and 1979, Montreal won the Cup eight times in 12 years. In that magical season of 1976-77, the team went 60-8-12, averaging nearly five goals a game (387 overall) and outscoring the opposition by an astounding 216 goals. They had the best record at home (33-1-6) and the best record on the road (27-7-6) In an era when goals were plentiful, Montreal was epically stingy on defense, yielding only 171 goals in 80 games, as few as the Bruins did this season in their first 80 games. Montreal had 10 players with 50 or more points, the first team in league history to accomplish that feat. They never lost back to back games and they went 24-6 in one goal contests (which means they only lost a game by more than a goal just twice all season long). Lafluer won the Hart Trophy as the league’s MVP while Dryden and his backup Michel Larocque shared the Vezina.
And then they finished things off in the Stanley Cup playoffs, going 12-2 with a +41 goal differential on their way to their second straight of what would eventually be four straight Stanley Cups between 1976 and 1979. In the Stanley Cup Final in 1978, they swept Boston, the only team that owned a winning record vs. Montreal in the regular season. The only games they lost that playoff were a pair in the semifinals to the New York Islanders, a team that would eventually start their own dynasty when time finally caught up with Bowman and the Habs after their last Cup in 1979.
And that’s the last hill for these Bruins to climb if they want to be considered the best ever. Every year somebody wins the President’s Trophy, and most of the time, that team fails to go on to win the Stanley Cup. And if you’re on the precipice of history …
It’s in this last test that the Bruins will have a tougher time than the Canadiens. The reason why: playoff inflation. In the 1978 Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Canadiens earned a bye into the second round. And when they came back, their first series was a best out of five affair before playing a pair of best of seven series to win the Cup. Boston won’t have that luxury this time, as the NHL has been playing best of seven series in every round for decades. That’s just one of the reasons why luck plays such an outsize role in the NHL and why the Bruins, like every other President’s Trophy winner, have the deck stacked against them come playoff time.
Can they win it all? They sure can. As David Waldstein of the New York Times pointed out on Monday, the Bruins have incredible depth down the middle (thanks to some very cap friendly contracts), three defensive pairings that each boast a puck moving pivot that can lead a power play, and the most important element for any hockey team, an elite goalie in Linus Ullmark that can steal games when the rest of the team isn’t playing their best. And while some folks had to catch their breath when Ullmark left the game against the Caps on Tuesday with a minor injury, there’s no indication that he won’t be on the ice and ready to go when the playoffs begin.
There’s one last thing, and it’s simply the feeling I’ve gotten this season when watching the Bruins. At the start of the game, you come up with ways to believe that the Bruins can be beaten, but as the time wears on, defeat begins to seem inevitable, almost like an Anaconda slowly squeezing the life out of its prey. When the Habs came to town in the 1970s, you were generally defeated before those immortals took the ice. And if the Bruins keep playing the way they have during the regular season, they’ll have their shot at immortality too.
POSTSCRIPT: If you want to read more about those Canadiens teams, I’ll again suggest reading Dryden’s epic on life in the NHL, The Game. Though the book chronicles the team’s twilight during the 1978-79 championship run, most of the faces are the same you would have seen during the 1976-77 season. If you can, consider listening to the audiobook with Dryden’s narration. Another Dryden book, Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other, combines biography with Bowman’s analysis of what he considers to be the eight best NHL teams of his lifetime, including his own 1976-77 Canadiens.
Eric McErlain lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. He blogged at Off Wing Opinion regularly from 2002-2009. In addition to writing at Off Wing, his work has appeared at The Sporting News, AOL FanHouse, NBC Sports.com, Deadspin, The Hockey Writers and Pro Football Weekly and The Washington Post. In 1993, he wrote one of the first columns in a daily newspaper covering fantasy football for The Washington Times.