Following a blown 3-0 series lead and a blown 3-0 lead in Game 7, you could say the same thing about this year's Boston Bruins.
That's not to "let 'em off the hook," to borrow a term from Green, but it is to say that the Bruins team that scrapped and clawed to make the playoffs and was inconsistent all year long was indeed what the Bruins were. They were not the inspired team that bounced the favored Sabres and built that 3-0 lead over Philadelphia.
Looking back to the regular season, it was a year that was plagued by injuries, plagued by "down years" from too many players and plagued by long stretches of disappointing play. It was a team that lacked scoring when it needed it most. All of those factors came rushing back to reality over the last four games, and really, it's our own fault for being surprised.
Perhaps what will be most frustrating for Bruins fans will be the lack of obvious answers. How does Dennis Wideman go from a plus-32 last year to a minus-14 this year? For that matter, how does Blake Wheeler go from a plus-36 to a minus-4? How does Tim Thomas go from the best goaltender in the league to the second-best goalie on his team? How does Michael Ryder take a major step backward in goal scoring at just the age of 30? How does a playoff team fail to have more than one player score 20 goals over the course of an 82-game season?
There are no answers to those questions, and there won't ever be. It's similar to the trading deadline, when Peter Chiarelli was stuck between a rock and a hard place. His best option seemed to be adding Raffi Torres, a guy who ended up being benched by the Sabres in Game 6 against the Bruins in favor of Nathan Gerbe — a 5-foot-6, inexperienced winger with just six career NHL points.
So, really, Bruins fans should be mystified, but they shouldn't really be shocked. Yes, the team had a 3-0 lead over the Flyers, but did they really look like a 3-0 team? Were they really three games better than a Philly team that played them well throughout the year?
Of course, the loss of David Krejci for Boston and the addition of Simon Gagne for Philly was likely enough to tilt the scale in favor of Philadelphia, but that alone was not the reason the Bruins are done.
"I'm not going to stand here and find excuses," Claude Julien said after the 4-3 loss Friday night. "The bottom line is we had a 3-0 lead in the series, we had a 3-0 lead [in Game 7], and we blew both. So there are no excuses. We have to take the responsibility that goes with it. Everyone."
While fans in Boston can't take responsibility, they could have been better prepared. There have been enough examples in the past year alone to be reminded that when push comes to shove and when every second takes on a world of importance, teams are revealed for being what they are.
It happened last October with the Red Sox. The team was, by all measures, pretty good but far from great. They were sixth in batting average and 16th in ERA. They finished eight games behind the Yankees, against whom they had lost nine of their final 10 contests after sweeping the first eight. When the Red Sox clinched the wild card — fittingly after their fifth consecutive loss — there was a nagging feeling that the team was not going to win a championship.
Yet the Sox were matched up with the Angels, and we started buying in. The Angels can't beat the Red Sox in the playoffs. Nobody wants to mess with Josh Beckett or Jon Lester in the playoffs. Mike Scioscia's club can't win at Fenway.
Nope, nope and nope.
The Angels outscored the Red Sox 16-7, Beckett and Lester gave up seven runs in 12 2/3 innings, and the Halos pulled off a ridiculous comeback on the Red Sox' turf to end the series. The Red Sox — who went 4-5 against the Angels in the regular season — were what they were, and it wasn't good enough to move on.
Three months later, it happened again. The Patriots were wildly unreliable all season, surrendering 320 yards per game (11th in the NFL) and failing to win a number of big games thanks to crunch-time mistakes. So, when they got matched up with the Ravens — a team they had barely beaten back in October — logic should have dictated that the Patriots would probably lose.
But no. We all said that this was the playoffs, and with Tom Brady under center and Bill Belichick running the show, a January loss in Foxboro just wasn't happening. They were 8-0 at home in the playoffs, and the Ravens would not overcome that.
Again, we were wrong, letting various distractions supersede what we all knew — the Patriots weren't built to win in January.
And so, when the Bruins beat the world's best goalie in the first round and built that indestructible 3-0 lead over Philadelphia, we all should have known. Yet we were wooed — by five-goal outbursts, by dramatic slap shots from Marc Savard, by spectacular goaltending from Tuukka Rask, by impressive and gutsy play from Mark Recchi, by a resurgence from Miroslav Satan, by the road to the Cup going through a seventh and eighth seed.
All proved to be distractions from what we knew to be the truth.
"I know this team," Julien said. "Two months ago, not too many people believed in it. We turned a corner and unfortunately, we weren't able to finish what we started. That's the unfortunate part. We've come a long ways from two months ago, and we had the opportunity to move further probably than anybody expected, and we weren't able to finish that."
As a coach, Julien's right to think his team turned a corner, but from the outside looking in, it's hard to say that any such occurrence took place. The Bruins simply were who we thought they were, and that won't make the upcoming offseason any easier for anyone to endure.
