With the Patriots success without Tom Brady and the Red Sox on their way into the match, expectations for New England’s hockey team will probably be extremely high — and unless they overachieve, Bruins backers will most likely be disappointed with the product Cam Neely has assembled for the upcoming season. Anticipate head coach Claude Julien’s buttocks to be planted firmly in the hot seat this year because his job security could be in question when the Bruins fail to make the playoffs for the third straight year.
Boston missed the playoffs by just 3 points a year after finishing with a respectable 93 points but made a few improvements into a roster with more than its share of rust. Zdeno Chara is far from your Norris winner he was he’s now on the wrong side of 40 and Tuukka Rask made serious regressions in a 2015-16 effort that saw him finish outside the top 20 in save percentage.
If this team is to succeed, it’s going to have to score and score a lot, something I’m not sure it is capable of. Beyond the very first line of Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron and David Backes — who had a combined 90 goals and 173 points in 2015-16 — that there is not a whole lot of goal-scoring experience with this roster. The projected second and third lines for Boston combined to score only 73 goals for their respective teams last season.
Stanley Cup +2500
The most important question here is this — can a group with one powerful lineup, no defense and a struggling Tuukka Rask make the playoffs and win four straight seven-game series? I have some serious doubts and unless Rask yields to Vezina kind, this still-rebuilding group has basically no opportunity to win another Cup this season.
Another hit to the Bruins’ Stanley Cup chances is that only one team in the last 20 years has missed the playoffs and then proceeded on to win the Cup the next season.
Eastern Conference +1200
For almost a decade, in the event that you wished to estimate how your team piled up in the Eastern Conference, you used the Bruins as a benchmark. They made conference titles in 2010-11 and 2012-13 and kept stacking their method by trading celebrities such as Joe Thornton, Phil Kessel and Tyler Seguin. That paradigm, however, has shifted as Boston is currently rebuilding and trying to shed some of the dead weight currently holding down the team.
Making the Stanley Cup final and winning a third conference title in the past seven years would take a miraculous run that I am not sure this group is up for.
Atlantic Division +650
The Tampa Bay Lightning will be the absolute class of the Atlantic Division right now and it’s going to be a hard job for any group — let alone the Bruins — to finish the season before Steven Stamkos and the Bolts.
Boston’s last division title came in the 2013-14 year when the Bruins finished atop the Atlantic in the first year of the most recent branch realignment that saw that the Detroit Red Wings join the Eastern Conference. The Bruins also finished the season with the most points at the league that year, earning the Presidents’ Trophy — that’s something this team won’t be doing.
Point total OVER/UNDER 93.5
BetOnline appears to be directly on the ball using those OVER/UNDER point totals and I have not really found any that I really love or see much worth betting. As previously mentioned, Boston had exactly 93 points annually and did not get much tangibly worse or better in almost any category. If you put a gun to my head, I would say UNDER as a result of parity I believe will exist among the teams fighting for the wild-card playoff spots this season.
Brad Marchand to Fight the League in Goal Scoring +2500
Boston will somehow need to compensate for the 30 goals they dropped if Loui Eriksson signed with the Vancouver Canucks at the offseason and Brad Marchand could be the beneficiary. It is a clear long shot with guys like Patrick Kane and Alex Ovechkin still in their primes, but Marchand ended sixth in the Maurice”Rocket” Richard Trophy race last season with his career-high 37 goals only 13 back of Ovi’s league-leading 50 and he is still playing alongside elite playmaker Patrice Bergeron, that appears to improve every year.
Read more: http://www.olcayreklam.com/jason-quigley-teams-up-with-andy-lee-as-he-reveals-comeback-plans/