BOSTON — There’s a difference between goals and expectations.
In the NHL, every team’s ambition each year is to win the Stanley Cup. The Boston Bruins, whose home arena has six championship banners hanging from its rafters, are very much a part of that group. You won’t find a single Bruins player, coach or executive who’ll say his ultimate goal isn’t to add a seventh.
But while a Cup run remains the goal as the Bruins prepare to begin the 2015-16 campaign, for the first time in years, it no longer is the expectation.
“We want a team that can compete for a Stanley Cup,” Bruins CEO Charlie Jacobs said Thursday during the team’s media day. “That’s our goal. Whether we … to handicap where we may be come springtime is very difficult to do sitting here today.”
He later added: “It hasn’t been necessarily a reboot, but maybe just a refresh.”
For Jacobs, who this past January said it would be “unacceptable” for the Bruins to miss the playoffs, this represents a rather drastic shift in philosophy.
Boston did end up missing out on a playoff berth last season for the first time since 2007, then proceeded to jettison a half-dozen roster regulars — and ex-general manager Peter Chiarelli — over the summer.
After that period of massive turnover, enter this season with question marks galore. Every line combination and defensive pairing was affected by either offseason turnover or training camp injuries, and while Tuukka Rask returns in net, the question of who will back him up still has yet to be decided.
Can the Bruins contend for a Cup as currently constituted? Perhaps. Boston’s veteran backbone — from Rask and Zdeno Chara to Patrice Bergeron and coach Claude Julien — remains intact, and the team has a wealth of talented-yet-unproven defensemen — not necessarily any who could replace the departed Dougie Hamilton, but certainly ones with the potential to contribute this season. The additions of Matt Beleskey and Jimmy Hayes also filled glaring holes up front.
But there’s a reason words like “transition” and “progress” and “development” and “improvement” were being thrown around so frequently on media day. With one week left until opening night, even the Bruins don’t know exactly what kind of team they have.
“I don’t want to put any expectations,” team president Cam Neely said. “Our goal is to compete for Stanley Cups. We’ll see how the season plays out. We have some cap space, which we haven’t had in a while, so we have opportunities down the road if there’s a situation that arises where (general manager Don Sweeney) feels like he can do something that’s going to help us improve.
“I really feel like we’ve got guys that want to compete for Stanley Cups on our roster. We brought in guys that do want to compete; they want to win. We’ll see where things go throughout the season, but I like the fact that we have opportunities to improve if need be. It’s a lot easier to do that when you can add without having to subtract.”
Thumbnail photo via Bob DeChiara/USA TODAY Sports Images
