In the modern era of hockey, no roster has been constructed with more brilliance than the Boston Bruins. This may seem like a bold statement, especially considering the performance of the Los Angeles Kings this year or the Chicago Blackhawks. But consider the following: the Boston Bruins are the only team in the league who can claim that their roster on paper has hurt other teams.
All the conversation surrounding the Bruins is about how difficult they are to play against, considering their physicality and ability to get under the opposition’s skin. But they don’t even need to put their team on the ice to show their value. That is because their blueprint is the hockey version of a venus fly trap: it seems alluring but ends up hurting teams when they try to copy it.
The perfect example of this phenomenon is the Vancouver Canucks, a team who have slowly and painfully seen their contender status slip away ever since being outclassed by the Bruins in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final.
In the first year after coming one game away from winning the Stanley Cup, on trade deadline day the Canucks fatefully decided that they required some grit in order to win the sixteenth game. In order to acquire this, they traded a massive piece in their organization: Cody Hodgson.
The acquisition of Zach Kassian, who had the sort of “intangibles” that the Canucks “required” will likely be a mistake that the team will regret for several more years. They also acquired Samuel Pahlsson, another character player who was supposed to bring similar aspects as Kassian. That year they also traded Christian Ehrhoff, the kind of offensive player that the Canucks really could have used over the last couple of years, regardless of price.
After this experiment failed miserably, the team tried to do it another way by bringing in a rough and tumble coach who would make them play a tougher style. But, if nothing else, John Tortorella was ultimately counterproductive to the team, forcing their hand on Roberto Luongo and indirectly sending Ryan Kesler out of town as well.
The Canucks, however, are not the only team to fall into this self-destructive trap initiated by the Bruins. The Buffalo Sabres are another team who became obsessed with the theory that Bruins hockey is the easiest way to win in this league after seeing their goaltender Ryan Miller run over by Milan Lucic.
The Sabres would bring in John Scott, Steve Ott, Nick Tarnasky and Adam Pardy in an attempt to become a team with the kind of toughness to step up the next time someone hit their goalie. The result was the exact same as with the Vancouver Canucks: the Sabres have only regressed since trying to recreate their own prototype of the “Boston Bruins model”.
As aforementioned, the same can be said for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who were one period away from beating the Bruins in the playoffs. The Leafs have long tampered unsuccessfully with the Boston model until that year, when they saw some legitimate success. They actually may have been the closest to successfully building the Bruins model, hey if anyone could, it would be Brian Burke.
But that loss ultimately warped the team’s perspective into thinking that they still needed to get tougher. That meant bringing in David Clarkson as the “player who could move Chara when it counted”. Basically, as their own version of a Milan Lucic that victimized them down the stretch.
If any team should be able to reproduce the Boston Bruins it should have been the team who popularized the style the Bruins have now adopted: the Broad Street Bullies. But they also were unable to replicate the team who had beaten them en route to a Stanley Cup. It ended up costing them Mike Richards, Jeff Carter and Kris Versteeg the next season.
Even the Montreal Canadiens, a team who have known their fair share of success against the Bruins, fell into their own Boston snare. In 2011-12, after losing in Game 7 overtime to the Bruins the year before, Montreal also tried to get bigger and tougher. They acquired Mark Mitera, Jeff Woywitka, Erik Cole, Brad Staubitz and Rene Bourque as big players who could stand up to their divisional rival. Two years earlier, Montreal even tried to play George Laraque on their top line against Boston and ended up being swept. Wonder why.
One of the consistent problems that has arisen with trying to replicate the Bruins model is its incredible balance of skill and grit. Everyone is constantly trying to draft the next Milan Lucic, or the next Zdeno Chara. They don’t seem all the difficult to reproduce, especially Lucic. But the thing is, both are prototypes. There is only one version of each in the league and that is in part why the Bruins are so good.
The truth is, you don’t beat the Bruins at their own game. This is what Montreal discovered this post season, exposing the ill-temperament and lack of speed that has plagued the Boston lineup. The Canadiens beat the Bruins playing Canadiens hockey, not a hybrid of the Bruins’ style.
But is almost seems like an addiction for some teams, as the obsession with the Bruins model in Vancouver continues to this very day. After the ship went completely off course this past year the team brought in Jim Benning as their new captain. Yes, the same Benning who has been one of the key players in the Bruins success as of late.
Benning may take the Canucks in a different direction than the Bruins, and has already made some savvy moves since joining the Vancouver front office. It absolutely looks like he is taking this team in the right direction. But acquiring Derek Dorsett sure felt a lot like something the Boston Bruins would have done.
The demons of Boston have yet to be fully exorcised in Vancouver, nor will they be in Toronto for the foreseeable future and Buffalo is still shaking off their effects. It is ultimately an example of how brilliantly the Bruins have been built: that even when teams try to copy their model it ultimately self-destructs.
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