This term is driving me nuts. Don't champions re-tool? They have won one round in three years and that was with their worst team.
The Detroit/Pittburgh comp is them when they started their demise/lackluster play, one round and done. Bruins are trending that way, and some would say already are there.
Where are all the good players coming from to push Boston to where we all want them to be? The July 1 guys have been overrated and overpaid for a few years now, there isn't much in the pipeline either. Marchand is old. Coyle looks old. Lindholm not young. McAvoy was better before his big extension. Lindholm looks great, but wrong side of 30. Carlo is limited. Lohrei who knows. Zadorov stinks. Swayman I am hoping like hell he's just gotta get up to speed. Re-tooling is a player or two away from being a Cup contender IMO, which I don't see here right now.
I don't associate championships with re-tooling, I associate old teams. If you have an old team, you can rebuild or re-tool. The Bruins have chosen the latter.
Good players will need to come from free agency and later in the draft (non top10 picks). That's where they got Chara, Savard and Thomas (UFA's). It's where they got Marchand, Krejci and Lucic (non top10 drafts). Heck, it's where they got Pastrnak, Swayman and McAvoy. Hopefully Lohrei and Poitras will be other examples of impactful players from late in the draft.
I don't agree that the whole team sucks either. It's weird for me because at the start of the season I kept saying something is wrong and most folks told me I was panicking and being alarmist... and now I feel like sentiment has swung too far the other way. We've gone from something is wrong to everybody sucks. Two months ago, nobody here thought our roster sucked.
I think we're caught in a perfect storm of issues...
Marchand and Pasta, the teams two best and most important players and play drivers are off to slow starts. The guys who are supposed to lift everyone up aren't doing it. (Not so much Marchand lately, and Pasta had his first good game in 8). The team in general is 20th in the league in shooting percent and I'm sure their best players not being on top of their game is contributing to that (both from them not scoring and from them setting up others for easy goals).
McAvoy, for the first time in his career, doesn't have a partner he gels with. Chara's gone, Grzelcyk is gone. Zadorov has been a mess. NHL coaches say it takes 3 months to learn a new system so some of Z's struggles could be just that, but he's also taking penalties and there's no excuse for that.
Swayman and his giant ego missed all of camp (which was a major distraction) and Mr Top5 goalie is off to a predictably slow start and is currently ranked 39th in the league (8 spots behind the backup nobody wanted). Swayman has been particularly bad on the penalty kill. This is not all on him, again Zadorov is an important PK'er and he's frequently out of position. They let Forbort go who was an important PK'er. They're trying new forwards on the PK who are learning new systems... but for Swayman's part, he is 73rd out of 74 NHL goalies in saves above expected on the PK.
Last but not least, there are roster issues. The chemistry was not there with Zacha-Lindholm-Pasta and trying to force it for 8 games cost them. We are at least one top6 player short of six top6 players. We knew that going in, but it seemed Sweeney overestimated their ability to weather that deficiency like they had in the past when Krejci was able to carry a line with only one legit winger. Coyle can't do that. So not only was Zacha-Lindholm-Pasta not working but you had no one left to play with Marchand-Coyle which meant the second line wasn't working either, and was losing their matchup every night. They're still trying to find a solution to that problem which is why we continue to see a carousel of combinations.
