A Powerhouse Like The Bruins Hasn't Lost In Round 1 In 50+ Years

Random as the NHL playoffs are, teams this good on paper usually advance early on.

So much for that President’s Trophy Curse not existing, huh?

Despite once holding a 3-1 lead over the underdog Florida Panthers in their first-round playoff series, the Boston Bruins — aka the most successful regular-season team in NHL history — are now out of the Stanley Cup chase. Even typing that sentence feels stunning! But with that result, we have our latest proof that hockey favorites are never safe, no matter how dominant they seem at any point during the season.

The Panthers deserve a ton of credit for their toughness and resilience in this matchup. In addition to fighting back from that big series deficit, they battled to tie Game 7 with a minute left after squandering a 2-0 second-period lead. Florida was actually outscored in the series overall, 27-26, but the Cardiac Cats had the stronger skating legs by overtime of Game 7 — as evidenced by multiple prime scoring chances leading up to Carter Verhaeghe’s game-winning shot in OT. Given the résumé of their opponent, these Panthers pulled off an upset that belongs in the annals of NHL history.

But that doesn’t mean the Bruins didn’t suffer a historic collapse as well. While hockey has a well-deserved reputation for pure chaos, NHL teams with home-ice advantage who led 3-1 went on to win 190 of 206 playoff series (92.2%) all-time, through the 2020 postseason. And as I mentioned above, Boston was no typical favorite; their pre-playoff Elo rating of 1649 was the seventh-highest in history. It’s almost unheard-of for a team that strong to lose in the opening round of the postseason.

Almost. Historically speaking, only one other first-round loser had a higher pre-series Elo rating than this year’s Bruins did — and that team also played in Boston. The 1970-71 Bruins had by far the best record in hockey that year, and by virtue of being the defending champs, they carried a sky-high rating of 1651 through the end of the regular season. But just like the 2022-23 version, those Bruins blew an early series lead and ended up falling to the Montreal Canadiens in Round 1 of the playoffs.

52 years later, history repeated itself with a Bruins team that looked practically unbeatable until the Panthers did it four times in the span of 11 days. Boston has plenty of time to think about what’s next, and plenty of questions about who will be back — chief among them being the matter of whether captain Patrice Bergeron will retire or not. But for now, the Bruins will also have to dwell on the what-ifs of a series that saw them go from the toast of hockey to merely the sport’s latest example of a historically dominant powerhouse sent home prematurely in the postseason.