Celtics

By TERRY LYONS

BOSTON – The most telling “official” sponsorship package in all of sports might be the “official window” company for every sports franchise. The official window might determine the “window of opportunity” and just when the windows open and close for your local professional club.

Maybe you can blame it on the quick-changing New England weather, but here in Boston, the windows seem to be closing all too often these days. When quarterback and team leader Tom Brady departed from the New England Patriots and tight end Rob Gronkowski soon followed him to Tampa Bay, the window of opportunity closed on the Patriots, like a guillotine at Marie Antoinette’s execution.

This spring, the double-hung windows at TD Garden were shuttered quite abruptly, as both the Boston Celtics of the NBA and the Boston Bruins of the NHL took early exits from their respective league playoffs.

After winning their 17th NBA Championship in 2007-08, the Celtics have remained (mostly) competitive with the exception of missing the NBA Playoffs in 2013-14. Boston made NBA Eastern Conference Finals appearances in 2016-17, 2017-18, 2019-20 (in the NBA Bubble).

This season, they advanced through a first-ever NBA Play-In game but lost to the Brooklyn Nets, 4-games-to-1, in the first round of the playoffs. Soon after, the Celtics accepted the retirement papers from their head of basketball, Danny Ainge, and decided to move their talented head coach, Brad Stevens, up the ladder to head-up basketball ops as GM.

While the Celtics’ core is young, strong and capable, team chemistry, size and frequent injuries remain as obstacles in front of the Celtics in order to advance in future NBA Playoffs. The window of opportunity for the current team seems to be closing before they could make it to the NBA Finals.

On the ice rink along Causeway Street, the Boston Bruins are realizing a similar fate.

Last season, the Bruins finished the “normal” season leading the NHL and in prime position for the approaching 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Then, the Coronavirus hit, and the Bruins lost momentum, and re-started by going 0-3 in the NHL bubble ‘seeding round.” The Bruins regained some confidence with a strong showing in the 2020 first round with a 4-1 series win over the Carolina Hurricanes but fell flat and dropped their second-round series to eventual champion Tampa Bay, 4-1.

This season, the Bruins finished third in a re-configured “East,” then won a competitive first-round series against the tough Washington Capitals before being eliminated, 4-games-to-2, against the upstart New York Islanders.

Suffice to say, the core of the Boston Bruins team is aging from the Stanley Cup Championship of 2011 and Stanley Cup Finals appearance and losses to the Chicago Blackhawks in 2013 and St. Louis Blues in the spring of 2019.

“Every year, as you don’t achieve your goal and the further you go in your career, you get to realize it’s a year closer to retirement,” said veteran center and team captain Patrice Bergeron after the Bruins were eliminated. “So, obviously, it’s tough. From one year to the next, it’s always a missed opportunity and you want to keep going at it. It’s hard. As you get older, you know that you don’t have that many chances to achieve your goal and have a team that can actually compete for a Stanley Cup, so it’s always disappointing. About changes, I’m not sure. It’s not up to me. You always want to keep the same group and I feel like we have a great group here. We’ll see what happens.”

Unfortunately, in the world of sports, we all know what happens.

HERE NOW, THE NOTES: For the Boston Bruins, the status of starting goalkeeper Tuukka Rask will be a key factor. Rask will soon have surgery for a torn labrum in his hip. The surgery will be scheduled within a month and recovery time could take five or six months from there. While some have speculated that Rask might test the free agent market upon return, much like former Bruins captain Zdeno Chara (now with the Washington Caps), Rask confirmed this week that it’s the Bruins or retirement. … “I’m not going to play for anyone else than the Bruins,” said Rask. “This is our home. We have three kids. The kids enjoy it here. They have friends in school. We have friends. At this point of my life and my career, I don’t see any reason to go anywhere else, especially with the health I’m looking at now and a recovery time of five or six months. Hopefully it works out that I recover well and we can talk about contracts when the time is right for that,” he concluded.

TRACK & FIELD AND TRACK SOME MORE? – According to The Japan Times, the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee plans to use GPS as a measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The GPS tracking devices are not intended to monitor the real-time whereabouts of people from overseas, but to trace and confirm their movements retroactively in the event infections are confirmed, Toshiro Muto, the Olympic Organizing Committee CEO said. … He told reporters that everyone entering Japan from abroad, including athletes, officials and members of the media, will be required to submit plans for their first 14 days in the country and turn on the GPS function on their smartphones. … “We’re not going to be tracking every single movement,” he told a news conference. “I want to trust they will follow the rules first.” … The system for possible COVID-19 contact tracing came at a high cost. Japan’s digital transformation minister Takuya Hirai said the development cost for the app was $35 million, according to the Tokyo-based newspaper Nikkei.

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