Damien Cox: Leafs-Bruins rivalry isn’t as one-sided as you think, unless you’re thinking playoffs

Oft-repeated and reworked to fit different contexts, it goes down as one of the great quotes in sports history.

“Let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row,” deadpanned Gerulaitis, the tennis playboy, after finally beating Jimmy Connors following 16 consecutive defeats.

The competition between the Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins, it should be said, isn’t that one-sided.

It just feels that way to Leafs fans, and probably to Toronto’s NHL entry itself. Regular-season competition has been back and forth over the years. In the post-season, the last three confrontations have all gone seven games, but it’s been the Bruins who survived and moved on all three times — in 2013, 2018 and again last spring.

Throw in playoff losses to Boston in 1969, 1972 and 1974, and it will be a tidy 61 years next spring since the Leafs beat the Bruins in the playoffs.

An NHL team could get a complex with that kind of Gerulaitis vs. Connors record against another team. But while Leafs Nation has nightmares about Boston, the Bruins live for their rivalry with Montreal. And they painfully ponder the two recent Stanley Cups that got away: a six-game defeat to Chicago in 2013 and a seven-game loss, with the final game on home ice, to St. Louis in the spring.

Those demons and that sense of unfinished business fuel the Bruins.

Heading into a pair of games against Toronto over the next four days, the Bruins seem to be picking up where they left off, with one regulation loss in seven games. Carried by stingy goaltending, a legendary defenceman and arguably hockey’s best forward line, you could draw some broad parallels between the modern Bruins and the Big, Bad Bruins of the early 1970s who were led by the goalie tandem of Gerry Cheevers and Eddie Johnston, rearguard Bobby Orr and the forward line of Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Wayne Cashman.

Many believe that team should have won more than the two Cups it did (1970 and ’72). The core of today’s Bruins — goalie Tuukka Rask, defenceman Zdeno Chara and the line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak — certainly could have two more titles to go with the one captured in 2011 against Vancouver.

Pastrnak, of course, wasn’t on that ’11 winner. But he’s leading the way this season with eight goals already, two more in a 4-3 overtime loss at home to Tampa on Thursday in a battle of the two best teams in the Atlantic Division, with all due respect to Buffalo’s early-season sizzle.

Pastrnak and his linemates are carrying the B’s in the early going even more than is usually the case. That one line has 14 of the team’s 19 goals. No other player on the Boston roster has more than one yet.

Toronto, meanwhile, is getting goals from all over its lineup, but has yet to beat a good team or show any consistency. While you might think the Leafs would be trying to emulate the Bruins in effort to figure out a way to beat them, the contrasts between the two clubs this season seem even more stark:

While Toronto did major surgery to its roster heading into the season, the only significant alterations the Bruins made were the addition of forward Brett Ritchie and the deletion of free-agent centre Noel Acciari.

Rask and Jaroslav Halak each have a shutout this season and can make a case for being the NHL’s best goalie tandem. In Toronto, Freddie Andersen has struggled again to start the campaign and the stubborn refusal of GM Kyle Dubas to invest in backup goaltending remains a problem.

The Bruins’ payroll is nicely balanced. They got restricted free agent defencemen Brandon Carlo and Charlie McAvoy under contract for a combined $7.75-million (U.S.) cap hit, and have all three members of their top line tied up for less than $20 million combined. The top heavy Leafs, by contrast, have devoted almost 50 per cent of their payroll to Tavares, Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander, and that has created depth challenges in other parts of the lineup.

Boston’s lineup oozes experience and is the fourth oldest in the NHL. Meanwhile, Matthews, Marner and Nylander are all 23 years of age or younger and the Leafs, after chopping one experienced veteran after another over the past two years to control costs, are one of the NHL’s youngest teams.

The Bruins are a committed, elite defensive team, third best in the NHL last season and third again this season. The Leafs allowed 3.04 goals per game last year to rank 20th, and are a little worse (3.38) so far this season.

Boston has been able to strike a nice balance between speed and physicality, while the Leafs have now almost completely shunned traditional hockey values of grit to go with a lineup based on finesse and skill.

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Bruce Cassidy, now in his fourth year as Boston coach, is as solid in his position as any current NHL coach. Mike Babcock is in the fifth year of an eight-year contract and is under fire in many corners.

Could two teams be more different? You certainly can’t accuse the Leafs of trying to copy Boston, that’s for sure.

The Bruins, at this point, shouldn’t consider the Leafs their most significant obstacle as they chase a fourth berth in the Cup final in nine years. It’s up to the Leafs to make them think differently.