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NiceShotMan t1_jar5dbv wrote

What is it with Boston and always having great teams in every sport? The Bruins especially, they don’t seem to need to rebuild, they won in 2011, made the cup finals again in 2013 and 2018, and now they’re the best team in the league again. Their worst finish in those years was 2015, where they were one place out of the wildcard.

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coletron3000 t1_jari4ew wrote

A lot of it’s just luck, but it helps that Boston has the entire New England market to draw from. Big, passionate fanbases mean high revenue and a strong incentive to spend money on quality players and coaches.

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NiceShotMan t1_jarisax wrote

> it helps that Boston has the entire New England market to draw from

Doesn’t seem to help the Leafs though….

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HoNose t1_jarsoj9 wrote

Considering the performance of Canadian teams, the obvious conclusions is that Canadians aren't big hockey fans.

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chris92315 t1_jarsssw wrote

The NHL is a hard cap league. There aren't the same ways to pay players more and push the "cap hit" to further years like you can in the NFL.

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RedTical t1_jarzok2 wrote

Unless of course you have your best players on LTIR then magically heal the same day as the first game of the playoffs.

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Matrix17 t1_jast5rp wrote

Are you forgetting the cap?

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coletron3000 t1_jasu6qo wrote

I was talking about all Boston sports, not just the NHL, but even with a hard cap having a large fan base lets you spend money on facilities, coaching staffs, nutrition programs, trainers, etc. Big markets are also enticing to players, who can earn more money through endorsement deals than they would in smaller markets.

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Roberto-Del-Camino t1_jav7ipn wrote

The Bruins have had the cheapest owner in the league for years. So when the NHL adopted a salary cap, they were kind of used to playing under an artificial salary cap and you could argue had an advantage over the rest of the league because of that.

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mylarky t1_jat2r2k wrote

It's a national scene. They don't "pull" from a regional market.

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ermghoti t1_jas4hgk wrote

Cyclical. Boston also went through decades of consistent and uniform irrelevancy to comic incompetence in all four major sports. Patriots were a punchline excluding 2-3 seasons from 1960 to 2001. Bruins and Sox had indifferent management cashing in on a captive audience while putting nothing into the team for most of that time. Celtics rode the original Big Three into a retirement crater, that spilled into the tragic deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis. The city was cursed for almost a full two decades

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NiceShotMan t1_jasddpt wrote

I’ll grant you the Sox, they had the curse of the bambino.

Two decades is nothing compared with anyone else though. Look at Chicago or New York: the Bulls and Hawks dropped off after their dynasties were over. Rangers haven’t won anything in like a century aside from 1994, and Knicks haven’t won since the 70s. Yankees haven’t won since 2009 despite being the richest team in baseball.

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ermghoti t1_jatcmx4 wrote

Sure, other cities have had/do have it worse. Still. Bruins had a drought from 1972 to 2011. Patriots from 1960-2001. Celtics from 1986 to 2008. The Red Sox... you know. For most of those years those teams were pretty non-competitive, the only drama was whether the Patriots would go ohfer the season. In recent years, the success of Boston teams has been disproportionately the Patriots' absurd and irreproducible success, aside from that there are six wins from 1987 to present.

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Roberto-Del-Camino t1_jav8z63 wrote

Just because they didn’t win championships during those drought years doesn’t mean they weren’t good teams. The Red Sox had winning seasons in 44 of their last 55 seasons. Their problem was being in the same division as the Yankees or running into all-time great teams when they made the World Series. But they have had a legitimate shot at the World Series almost every year for half a century.

The Bruins have made Stanley Cup runs every few years since 1970. They just couldn’t get over the hump.

The Celtics have been great since the 1950’s. Losing Len Bias and Reggie Lewis took them 10 years to get over.

And even the Patriots competed for championships once a decade from the 1960’s to 2000 before dominating the NFL for 20 years. The late 70’s Pats we’re excellent but they got sabotaged by their coach leaving without notice. The 85 Pats lost a Super Bowl to the greatest team in NFL history. The 96 Pats lost to peak Brett Favre while their coach was setting up his next job.

New England fans have been lucky. I think the real reason is because they’re passionate but will call out ownership when things aren’t good.

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ermghoti t1_javpdg0 wrote

None of that's wrong, but it lacks context. People insert emotion into patterns. When it's believed your baseball team is cursed, and your basketball team appears to have been snuffed out by the hand of an angry god, near championship runs are viewed as proof that that they can never prevail, not that they are the cusp of ultimate success. I'm speaking as a transplant from around 1990, having family in the area all my life. The sports fans were always waiting to see how the failure was going to happen.

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Roberto-Del-Camino t1_jaw7yxd wrote

If you moved here in 1990 then the Pats fans didn’t expect anything. That was possibly the nadir of the franchise. The Celtics fans were coming off the Bird years and were used to excellence. The Bruins were good. But they had lost to Gretzky’s Oilers in the Cup Finals 2 out of the previous 3 years.

But, yes, despite winning the East 3 out of the previous 5 years, Red Sox fans had the “what’ll go wrong this year” mindset. That ended in 2004 for most of us and 2007 for all but the most pessimistic fan.

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ermghoti t1_jawoqrw wrote

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Also, so many of those near misses were seen as attributable to misfortune (ill timed injuries, unexpected deaths, Patriots being robbed in the 1976 Divisional round, etc), or grotesque incompetence (e.g. Parcells seemingly no-showing in 1996, Grady Little). The sports city viewed itself as long-suffering.

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Roberto-Del-Camino t1_jax0ikj wrote

You nailed it. All of that changed in 2004 when the Six won the World Series. Even though the Pats had just won 2 Super Bowls and we’re on their way to a third, the cloud didn’t really lift until the Red Sox reversed the curse.

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Manablitzer t1_jasfl5d wrote

As far as it happening in Boston it's mostly luck. Imagine where the Pats would be if the browns never moved and Bill stayed in CLE or even NY. But a true core of great players can really stabilize a team for a long time.

Bergeron, krejci, Chara and rask were all on the bruins as far back as '07, with marchand drafted in '09, and pastrnak in '14 (this is his 9th bruins season!). They've had serious stability from their top 5-6 players for the past 15 years.

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MathMaddox t1_jariftm wrote

Well, the Sox have been terrible recently. The Pats are middling at best right now and the Celtics have had their ups and down.

It's funny because if you listen to sports radio around here its almost always doom and gloom. For instance, according to the radio, the Bruins will be terrible soon and they shouldn't have stocked up for this year.

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rangerfan123 t1_jarlcol wrote

Celtics are 1 of 8 teams in the 4 major sports to make the playoffs 9 out of the last 10 years. Seems like mostly ups to me

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ItsGettinBreesy t1_jarn3bp wrote

One finals appearance in that time and 1 championship since the 80’s.

I’m not salty, I’m just a Lakers fan lol

Edit: lots of salty boston fans apparently

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Augen76 t1_jary7dw wrote

My buddy from Boston is always negative. "Yeah, we won, but we might not next time." Cracks me up seeing as how long other fanbases go with nothing to show for it.

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[deleted] t1_jas7t5g wrote

[deleted]

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Its_me_mikey t1_jas8xhk wrote

They both their respective 2018 season. Pats beat the Rams in the super bowl in 2019 but still considered the 2018 season

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Angrymic2002 t1_jatawfx wrote

What radio show are you listening to? There is only one person on the radio who even talks hockey other than the weekend hockey shows and he said just the opposite.

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MathMaddox t1_jatbt8x wrote

Felger and Maz.

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Angrymic2002 t1_jate224 wrote

Felger spent the entire day talking about how the B”s will be able to sign who they need to sign and that they will be really good again next year. Maybe I heard it differently.

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MathMaddox t1_jatjo3y wrote

He was complaining yesterday that they were screwing the future and hated "all in". Maybe he realized the pick to the red wings was lottery protected.

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Angrymic2002 t1_jatb9hg wrote

My 20 year old daughter has been to 12 parades. One in uteri but it counts. She hasn’t been to one in over four years now. When will this nightmare end. /s

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