Boston Bruins: How does their 5 game pace look after 5 games?
By Luke Ryan
An NHL season is a marathon, not a sprint, hence we’re breaking the Boston Bruins campaign down into five-game chunks to see how they’re tracking.
It’s arguable that no team has had a tougher starting schedule than the Boston Bruins. Starting on the road has to happen for half the teams in the league, sure.
Starting with four consecutive road games and against some strong Western Conference teams; that’s a rough way to start the season. Or perhaps, in the Boston Bruins’ case it’s actually the perfect way to start the year.
In going to Dallas, Arizona, Las Vegas and Colorado and coming away with a 75% winning record, you could argue that the hard start was actually perfect for them.
Not only has it allowed a team that bonded over the misery of a Game 7 loss in the Stanley Cup Final last summer, but it’s allowed them to spend the first week of this new year on the road hanging out as opposed to going back to their own homes and families each night.
Perhaps, the scheduling in that sense is an absolute blessing in disguise. They’ve also gotten some tough teams out of the way early on when everyone is still finding their feet and ironing out any issues with new systems or summer acquisitions.
They say to make the playoffs, you need to approach every five-game stint in the NHL season with the intention of taking away at least 60% of the points which translates over the course of a whole season to roughly 98 points.
That works perfectly when you look at last season’s Eastern Conference standings; the Columbus Blue Jackets got in as the second wild-card team with 98, whereas the Montreal Canadiens just missed out on 96.
The year before 97 points were enough for the New Jersey Devils and Columbus to tie up the wild-card spots, so you see it’s a very finite margin. Anyhow, how are the Boston Bruins looking in that regard after the first set of five games?