The 2007 Patriots, the 2015-16 Warriors, and now, the 2022-23 Bruins: Boston joins list of record-breaking teams without a title

Bruins From Tom Brady (left) and 2007 Patriots to Stephen Curry (right) and the 2016 Warriors, record-breakers have struggled to win it all in recent years. Are the Bruins next?

By Amin Touri, The Boston Globe

April 30, 2023

When Michael Jordan returned to basketball in 1995 and won his fourth MVP award as the Chicago Bulls tore through the NBA en route to a record-setting regular season, his priorities were clear: “72-10 don’t mean a thing without the ring.”

Those Bulls finished the job, cruising through the Eastern Conference playoffs with one loss and handling business against the SuperSonics in six games in the 1996 NBA Finals. That was once the norm in the four major North American men’s pro sports — historic regular seasons giving way to championships, like the 1971-72 Lakers winning it all after a 69-win campaign to the 1972 Dolphins and their flawless 14-0 season capped off by a Super Bowl.

But in the quarter-century since Jordan and Co. romped to their fourth title, regular-season dominance isn’t what it used to be.

The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors are the only team to have matched those Bulls in the regular season, with a historic MVP campaign from Stephen Curry and a scorching 24-0 start driving a 73-9 mark. Those Warriors were overwhelming favorites to win it all, taking a 3-1 Finals lead over LeBron James and the Cavaliers before a famous collapse.

The 2001 Seattle Mariners set a new standard for baseball dominance. The arrival of Ichiro Suzuki coincided with a 116-win season, tying a nearly century-old mark that only one team since has come within five wins of. Instead of a title, all those Mariners earned was a five-game ALCS exit against the Yankees. They missed the postseason for 20 straight years, finally earning a berth last season.

The next major history-makers were the 2007 Patriots, who set myriad scoring records and became the first NFL team to go 16-0. The rest of that story is pretty well-documented.

The most recent record-breakers were the 2018-19 Lightning, who set new standards for both winning and subsequent playoff embarrassment. A 62-win season earned them the Presidents’ Trophy. They were clear Stanley Cup favorites, with Art Ross and Hart Memorial winner Nikita Kucherov and Vezina winner Andrei Vasilevskiy — all before the Lightning were swept out of the first round by the Blue Jackets, with a bizarre apology tweet to boot.

Which brings us to this year’s Bruins, who were historically dominant to one-up that Lightning squad to the tune of 65 wins. Boston consistently looked a class above the rest of the league during the regular season and entered the playoffs poised to hoist its first Stanley Cup since 2011.

But all of a sudden, their 3-1 first-round lead over the Panthers evaporated. And on Sunday night, they lost, 4-3 in overtime, to the No. 8-seed Panthers. The Bruins are just the latest record-breaking team to fall victim to championship expectations.

When the Globe’s Julian Benbow dug into the data last week, it was clear topping the charts when the prize is playoff seeding makes for no guarantee, particularly in baseball and hockey.

The NHL can’t compete with the particularly wild unpredictability of the MLB playoffs, but it’s not far off; Presidents’ Trophy winners famously struggle to parlay that award into the big one, with only eight of the 36 winners going on to lift Lord Stanley’s Cup. Maybe we can excuse those Mariners, too, in a sport where the regular-season wins leader only wins it all about a quarter of the time in recent years, a mark comparable to hockey’s.

But history tells us record-breakers aren’t kept down for long.

Those Warriors had a Kevin Durant-shaped ace up their sleeve and responded with back-to-back titles after the disappointment of 2016; the Lightning something similar, winning two Stanley Cups in the three years after their own famous failure; and while it took the Patriots a few years to reach the summit again, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady still had a whole separate dynasty after David Tyree’s helmet catch robbed them of perfection.

But that will provide little solace for now to these Bruins, for whom 65 wins doesn’t won’t mean a thing without the ring.

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