The 2022-23
Boston Bruins are the best team I’ve ever seen.
A team like this shouldn’t exist under the constraints of the current era, but the Bruins have found a way. They always seem to find a way. They win games in dominating fashion. They win close games. They win games they should win. They win games they shouldn’t win. They just win.
There’s an inevitability to them, an aura of victory that just permeates off their bench. That’s what it felt like watching them somehow pull a win out of nowhere on Tuesday against
Calgary — a game they had absolutely no business winning. The Flames were relentless, outshooting Boston 57-19, and it didn’t matter. The Bruins found a way.
That was already the case long before the deadline and then they went and added
Dmitry Orlov and
Garnet Hathaway, two players who created an even larger divide between the best and the rest. Orlov is a top-pairing defender and one of the game’s best puck-movers; an underrated force from the back end who handles tough minutes well. Hathaway might be the league’s most valuable fourth-liner, making one of the league’s deepest forward groups even deeper. The rich get richer.
Now the question is can anyone stop them? Probably not. And that’s why Boston’s current chances of winning the Stanley Cup are 34 percent. It implies the team has an average series probability of 70 percent in each round. That’s incredibly high, but anything less would be a disservice to this team’s dominance.
Of course, not every series would be equal. Some — especially in the Eastern Conference gauntlet — would be much tougher. No team in the league would be favored against Boston, but here’s what odds each prospective playoff team would have in a seven-game series against the Bruins.
