Whilst the Boston Bruins did indeed miss out on making the play-offs in two of those ten most recent seasons, you can’t over-look the fact that they missed out on wild card spots both years by two and three points; not exactly the margins we’ve seen other ‘rebuilding’ teams miss by.
The past few years have seen teams like the Ottawa Senators, New York Rangers and Toronto Maple Leafs, just to name some of the Eastern Conference names, openly inform their fan bases that ‘there is pain coming’ and they need to stick behind their team despite the fact they’ll be undergoing major overhauls.