NHL Awards Show expected to be awkward night for Boston Bruins
BOSTON -- The Boston Bruins will likely be awarded many times over for the team's historic regular season run at Monday night's NHL Awards show in Nashville. Unfortunately, those regular-season awards will only remind everyone of Boston's failure in the playoffs.
After setting the NHL record for most wins and points in a regular season, Boston head coach Jim Montgomery is probably going to take home his first Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. Linus Ullmark, who won 40 games and led the NHL with a 1.89 goals-against average and .938 save percentage, is the favorite to bring home his first Vezina Trophy as the league's best goaltender. Patrice Bergeron will likely bring home his record sixth Selke Trophy as the best defensive forward, and after a 113-point season, David Pastrnak is a finalist for the Hart Memorial Trophy.
That's a lot of potential hardware for one team.
"It speaks to, you know, the season we had," Montgomery said from Nashville on Sunday. "Whether you wanna use the term magical or historical, we had a great year and a lot of players got recognized for team success."
Those are all the individual awards that the Bruins are going for after their incredible 65-win, 135-point campaign in the regular season. But they'd all be consolation prizes, and likely put in the back of the trophy shelf. What they represent will probably sting for a while.
When things mattered most in the playoffs, the Bruins came up short. Well short. Boston didn't even make it out of the opening round, falling in seven games to the 8-seeded Florida Panthers, who ultimately lost to the Vegas Golden Knights in the Cup Final.
The sting of that first-round defeat hasn't dulled over the last two months. Montgomery said that he couldn't even watch the rest of the playoffs after Boston was eliminated.
"It was too hard to watch, to be honest," said Montgomery. "I couldn't watch it as a fan. I would turn the TV off and go play cards or go play golf with my sons."
Ullmark didn't watch the playoffs either, but said a lot of that had to do with his young family and the fact that he was back home in Sweden after Boston's season ended.
"I was keeping track of it but I wasn't watching any games," he said. "Watching at 1 a.m. is not something I like to do when I have the kids to take care of."
The Bruins' regular season will be celebrated Monday, but their postseason will be the butt of several jokes throughout the evening. It's gonna get awkward at times. Probably a lot of times.
While the NHL will be looking back on what didn't happen with the Bruins on Monday night, Ullmark has chosen to focus on what is ahead.
"I'm very motivated and very inspired to get next season started. That's all I can say. I try not to dwell on the past; what's happened has happened. But it's given me a lot of time to think about what I can improve in my game and learn from the things that happened," he said. "When next season comes and I'm put in the same positions, I'll be a lot more confident."
Montgomery, however, has indeed looked back at what went wrong when his team let a 3-1 series lead slip away to the Panthers. He said he can still see all the games so vividly and will catch himself breaking them down in his head.
"I thought we played slow compared to the regular season. We were very fluid in the regular season. In the playoffs, we played fast Games 3, 4, and 5. The other games we didn't play fast," Montgomery said. "The defending part kind of got away from us, especially in big moments. One part of our evaluation was the net-front battle, and I think we lost that.
"There were too many screens and not enough boxouts for our liking," Montgomery added. "If we won that area, I feel like we would have moved on."
Monday night could have been the final chapter of a monumental campaign for the Bruins. The individual awards would have been the cherry on top of a historic season for the franchise.
Instead, they'll now feel a little hollow. The best regular season in NHL history will always include a "yeah, but...", which will make Monday night's celebrations a bit awkward for everyone who takes home a trophy.
