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Well, another hockey regular season in Boston has come to a close. It wasn’t bad enough that the team finished dead last in the NHL last season. This season, after getting the number one draft choice, Joe Thornton, the guy only scored three goals and seven points! He played 55 games, and only seven points? Way to pick ‘em, Harry.

One of their other top picks from the year before, Cameron Mann, plays three games in Boston, and rings up one whole point. The other hotshot they signed out of college last year, Randy Robitaille, had four games and a big zero.

And the goalie of the future, part 2? Jim Carey, traded for when Harry gave up on goalie of the future number one, Bill Ranford, struggled. This guy Carey, he ends up getting sent to the AHL to a last place team and then he goes out with a bum shoulder. Great move that.

So they bring in a tough guy, Ken Baumgartner. The Bomber is here as a protector, see his job is to keep the thugs away from Joe Thornton and the goons away from Ray Bourque. So the guy rings up one lousy point in 82 games, and he end up -14 in the plus/minus. Sheesh.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Don Sweeney gets sandwiched and his shoulder blade gets snapped like a potato chip. He misses 23 games, like the Bruins can afford that. And Kyle McLaren was hurting a bunch too - he missed 17 games. Steve Heinze came back from his injuries of the prior year only to get hurt again, and he missed 22 games.

And Ted Donato goes from being the team’s second best scorer with 26 goals and 51 points to just 16 goals and 39 points. What’s the world coming to?

So what does Harry Sinden do? He trades away Jozef Stumpel, probably the best guy on the team, to LA just because of a few bucks on a contract, and the guy becomes their leading scorer. And the guy they throw in like old hamburger, Mr. Broken Bone himself, Sandy Moger, ends up playing 62 games for the Kings and becomes a major part of their playoff-bound team.

Now, if you left Boston last year around May first, spent the year in Antarctica snowboarding on the polar ice shelf, and then came back to Boston to read the preceding litany of Bruins woes, you would undoubtedly say "Oh well, another year out of the playoffs."

To the delight of the faithful Bruins fans, oh, how wrong you would be.

Despite the aforementioned mere hiccups, the Boston Bruins were the most improved team in the NHL in the 1997-98 season. Boston improved a full 30 points in the standings, going from dead least to fifth in the Eastern Conference, and coming within a whisker, or perhaps a Penguin, of home ice advantage.

The Bruins' return to the playoffs, after enduring a year that even Ray Bourque now admits was down and divisive, was engineered by the oft-maligned and always crusty Harry Sinden. Harry is the closest thing that the Generation X NHL has to old-time hockey, and though he often seems out of step with the mainstream (mainly with regard to salaries and free agents), Harry has proved once again that he can build a winning hockey team. Now, can he, or will he, build them into a Cup-winner? That is the bigger question.

Harry’s biggest decision was to hire Pat Burns. At first, this move seemed almost heretical - Burns coached the hated Habs, for Orr’s sake. Didn’t Harry remember how pompous this guy was behind the Canadiens bench all those years? And then Burns goes off and hires Jacques Leperriere, another ex-Hab. Sacre Bleu, Blanc, et Rouge! There goes the neighborhood!

However, it didn’t take long before Bruins’ fans were thinking a little differently about Mr. Burns. He came to town, talked straight, and coached the same way. He commanded respect and attention from his players, and he rewarded hard work. He brought order to the on-ice chaos, taught the team to believe in itself, and put up with no nonsense.

The result was a remarkable improvement in the standings, and in the players as individuals and as a team.

But even Pat Burns needed help. If Burns had been brought in a year earlier, the Bruins still probably would have fallen out of the playoffs. Evidence of this can be seen in a glance at the team stats. Players who were mainstays in the prior year, like Dean Chynoweth and Barry Richter, barely saw a game with the Bruins. Others, like Trent McCleary and Jeff Odgers, were merely set adrift.

A comparison of last year’s player stats to this year’s shows another difference - the 96-97 stats list 40 players, and that doesn’t even count the ones traded away to the Capitals (Adam Oates, Rick Tocchet, and Bill Ranford). This year’s stat register shows 32. Callups from the AHL Providence Bruins were few and far between, mostly because of injuries. None of this Boston-to-Providence shuttle that had dominated the roster over the past few years. Burns carried an extra player or two in Boston, and when somebody didn’t show Pat the level of hustle he expected, the extra players dressed in their stead.

Burns was never caught shorthanded like Steve Kasper was, resulting in discipline becoming humiliation, as with his benching of Cam Neely and Kevin Stevens. If he had carried two extra players, he could have sat Neely and Stevens in the press box, and there wouldn’t have been tearful news conferences and dissension among the players.

With Burns in the fold to straighten out the on ice situation, Sinden proceeded to shore up the roster. The monster trade with Washington was looked at with Carey as the main player, with Anson Carter and Jason Allison as typical Bruins bit players. Allison would never live up to his potential, harped the critics.

Well, it turns out that what Jason Allison needed was a good dose of Pat Burns. Burns told Allison straight up that he could be as good as he wanted to be, but only if he wanted it and worked for it. Allison responded, and he became the Bruins 97-98 scoring leader, with 33 goals and 49 assists for 82 points and a plus 32 +/- rating. Some of the scoring moves Jason made during the year will remain on Bruins highlight films for a good while. He combined a beautiful passing touch with the kind of swooping power moves that the Bruins last saw with Can Neely. At least six or seven times during the season, Allison went in back of the net, with a defenseman draped over him, dug the puck out, and skated it to the front of the crease, holding the puck on his stick with one arm and holding the defender off with the other, and flipped the puck into the net after faking down the goalie. He did this against Dominik Hasek, he did it against Martin Brodeur, and several other unfortunates. The contrast was so great between the kid who came over from Washington to the player who led the Bruins back to the playoffs that some Bruins fans called Allison "Bag O Pucks" referring to his original status as a spare part in the Jim Carey trade. It was a thrill to watch Allison progress from an all-right kid to a legitimate first line NHL player.

Anson Carter also had a career year, although nowhere near as stellar as Allison’s. But he went from an 18-point season to a 43-point season, his best as a pro. Carter spent a lot of time on a line with Ted Donato and Steve Heinze, and his hard work and muscle were a good part of the reason Heinze was so successful.

Harry Sinden made five other personnel moves that struck gold this year. He added Sergei Samsonov, Dimitri Khristich, Byron Dafoe, Tim Taylor, and Dave Ellett, and dramatically changed the face of the team.

Harry and Mike O’Connell picked the diminutive Sergei Samsonov, a 19-year-old IHL player, with the eighth pick in the draft. All Samsonov has done is become the leading candidate for the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year. Now granted, a big part of that status results from playing on the Allison line and getting the ice time. But there is no question that Sergei earned his way. Samsonov first impressed with his speed and stickhandling, but there was something else. Even in pre-season, the guy just had a knack for being in the right place, and after some game time on the first line, those right places started turning into right times as well. Sergei was adept at digging the puck out, avoiding the big crunches, and finding his teammates in the open. Once Pat Burns cured the boy of a little self-modesty about shooting rather than passing, Samsonov began to catch up with the other rookie leaders, eventually surpassing them.

But that only makes two-thirds of a top line, so Harry and Mike decided to make the best of Jozef Stumpel’s salary demands by trading him to LA for Dimitri Khristich. This turned out to be pure genius, because Dimitri was just the linemate Sergei really needed. Khristich came out of LA with a bit of a bad rap as an attitude problem. This quickly became a non-issue under Pat Burns and Khristich showed that he could do more than snipe for goals. On a non-hitting line, Khristich was often the first into the corners, and he wasn’t shy about giving or taking a bump to play the puck to a linemate. Quite frankly, these were unexpected qualities. He ended up tying his second best career season totals with 66 points, and 23 of those points came on the power play, the best output of his career.

Oh, by the way, the Khristich trade also included a backup goaltender. The experts figured Byron Dafoe to back up Jim Carey, but it didn’t take too long into pre-season to see that there was a real battle going on for the number one spot. And Dafoe won out, primarily because he was more confident and consistent. Byron went on to register his first winning season as an NHL goalie and hit the 30-win plateau just before the season ended. He also registered six shutouts, and was a big part of the reason that the Bruins' goals-against went down by 106 goals, a fair amount better than the goal-per-game reduction Pat Burns targeted for the year (amid the critics snickers and guffaws). While the defensive game plan Burns instilled was the primary reason the Bruins improved so much, it was Dafoe who often kept them in a critical game with his borderline miraculous saves.

The Bruins picked up Tim Taylor from Detroit, and looking back, this is still perhaps one of the more amazing steals of the year. Now, Taylor was small potatoes in Detroit, playing a very minor part in the Stanley Cup win. However, with the Bruins, Taylor has centered the checking line the Bruins put out against every other teams number one line. Yes, every player on the line has a negative +/-. But Taylor scored 20 goals, and his linemates scored eight and 10 for a total of 38, which is 17 percent of the Bruins total goals. Not bad for a checking line that plays against the Jaromir Jagrs, John LeClairs, and Mike Modanos of the world, night after night.

Finally, Dave Ellett was an incredible find. Dave split time between Toronto and New Jersey the prior season, and New Jersey let him go. Boston, in dire need of another experienced defensive veteran, was quick to sign him. Ellett is a little long in the tooth, but he still plays a solid game, but with more offensive threat than a run-of-the-mill defensive defenseman. Dave has brought stability to the defense pairs, and balanced the Bruins' youth on defense with veteran experience.

If that wasn’t already more than one could expect from new faces on the team, two other players served in roles well beyond preseason expectations. These were two rookie players who couldn’t be more different, but nonetheless had a similar positive impact on the team. The first was Per Johan Axelsson. PJ was nicknamed "Gumby" early on in the season for his loosey-goosey skating and hitting style - he looked like he had double-joints where other people had bones. He could skate fast, stickcheck like a demon, hit and take a hit, and generally make a thorough pest of himself without stepping over that imaginary line and drawing a penalty. He had tremendous range and a long reach, which made him ideal for penalty killing. All in all, PJ was perfect for his checking line role with Tim Taylor and Rob DiMaio.

Rounding out the rookie crop was Hal Gill, as huge as PJ was gangly. Gill was not even really expected to make the team, but he ended up playing 68 games, most of them as Ray Bourque’s defense partner. While his point totals were modest, Gill made up for it by playing steadily in his role as Ray’s protégé. Gill, who had Ray Bourque posters all over his wall at home, managed to avoid being transfixed by Bourque’s stardom, and he actually was able to take some heat off Ray, often by using his incredible reach to tie up a puck carrier until Ray could scoop up the puck.

There are obviously other players on the Bruins who have contributed to the team’s outstanding success this season, but the players mentioned above are the ones who made the biggest difference between the sad sack last place team of 96-97 and the proud, together team that earned a spot in the playoffs in 97-98. Now they must rise to the new challenge of playoff hockey. Hopefully, the Bruins have built the right mix of playoff veterans and young legs that will propel the team past their first round opponent, Washington, into the later rounds of the playoffs.

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