With all due respect to columnist Bob Ryan, we’re going to steal one of his ideas and publish a “State of the Local Teams” recap.
The veteran Globe scribe usually releases his annual rundown at the end of the calendar year, but we’ll run our’s since two of the five major Boston sports are winding down their seasons, while the three others are either about to start their seasons, or have training camps looming in the coming weeks.
Instead of listing the teams alphabetically, as Ryan does, we’ll rank them in terms of how close they are to world-championship status, from furthest to nearest.
New England Patriots
Yes, the mighty have fallen significantly from just four-and-a-half years ago, or even two years ago, when QB Mac Jones was coming off a 10-7 2021 campaign as a rookie, replacing Cam Newton, who was replacing — who else? Tom Brady. The wheels have come off the franchise in the two seasons since that most-recent above-.500 season, starting with the 2022 season, when the Patriots were a respectable 6-4 heading into a Thanksgiving-Day matchup in Minneapolis. New England built a 23-16 lead early in the second half, only to get outscored 17-3 the rest of the way as the Vikings prevailed, 33-26. The Pats then proceeded to finish that season on a 2-5 skid, and that paved the way for last year’s disastrous season that saw the team finish an unsightly 4-13 and cost longtime Patriots head coach Bill Belichick his job, and also marked the end of Jones’ tenure in New England.
Now the NFL’s once-dynastic franchise is in the gutter, with a new head coach who has never even been a coordinator before; a veteran offensive coordinator who has pretty much never called plays even though he’s 54 years old; an offensive line and receiving corps that are widely viewed as either the most mediocre, or maybe even the worst in the league; and three QBs on the roster, two of whom have never taken an NFL regular-season snap, and the other, 31-year-old Jacoby Brissett, is for the most part a career backup who has played in just 79 games in eight full NFL seasons.
The defense is still the Patriots’ strength, but it has, in the past month-plus, lost both its best edge rusher in Matthew Judon (trade) and star defensive tackle Christian Barmore (blood clots), with the latter likely to miss the entire 2024 season just as teammate David Andrew did with the same diagnosis prior to the 2019 season. All of these factors make the Patriots likely to again be one of the NFL’s worst teams this season, and 2-15 or 3-14 seasons are not off the table.
Boston Red Sox
The Sox were a juggernaut just six seasons ago, running away with their most recent World Series title. Since then, the team has cut spending, settled for mediocre talent, and traded away or let walk in free agency some of its best players, including superstars Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, and Chris Sale (16-3 with a 2.46 ERA as of this writing, and viewed as a solid Cy Young candidate for the Braves). Since that 2018 championship season, Boston has finished in the AL East basement three of the past five seasons, and while it has been solidly in third place in the division all season long in 2024, with a high-water mark of 11 games over .500 on July 14 (and 10 games over .500 as recently as a month ago), the team has slumped in recent weeks, and finds itself at .500 (70-70) heading into the weekend against the woeful White Sox.
Boston’s wild-card hopes are fading fast, and the remaining September schedule does them no favors after the Pale Hose leave town (including seven combined with the Yankees and Orioles and six with the fourth-place Rays, who have climbed to within a game of the Sox in the division). What is most telling about this Boston team, dating back to the beginning of the 2019 season, is that its home record is a remarkably average 211-213. Fenway may be America’s Most Beloved Ballpark, but it has been viewed as such more so by the visiting teams coming in rather than the ballclub in the home whites.
New England Revolution
The only one of the five major Boston sports teams still without a championship, the Revs seemed to be on an upward swing when they hired legendary USMNT and MLS coach Bruce Arena to coach the team midway through the 2019 season. Two seasons later, the team was the best in MLS during the regular season with a 22-5-7 record, but choked away its opening playoff game on its home field and has never been the same, especially since Arena was suspended and then resigned last summer under still-mysterious circumstances.
Under new coach Caleb Porter, the former coach of two different MLS Cup champions, the Revs got off to a brutal start in 2024, sitting in the East basement for the better part of the first half of the season, but they’ve made some in-season trades and signings that bode well for the future of the team, especially with a top-notch goalkeeper in Aljaz Ivacic. Yes, the team this season is still 13th in the East (tied with two other teams), but things should be looking up for the team next season, and perhaps even for the remaining eight matches of this current regular season.
Boston Bruins
Memories of the 2022-23 season still hurt diehard hockey fans around here. Like the 2021 Revolution, the Bruins of two seasons ago were by far the best regular-season team in the NHL, breaking league and franchise records left and right en route to a 65-12-5 record. Then, again like the Revs, the B’s stumbled in the opening round of the playoffs against the eighth-seeded Florida Panthers, wasting a 3-1 series lead and falling in OT in Game 7 on Garden ice. Perhaps it soothed Bruins fans’ feelings that those Panthers got all the way to the Stanley Cup Final as an eight seed, and a year later hoisted Lord Stanley’s chalice as one of the league’s most dominant teams, but the truth is the truth: in the Bruins’ 100-year history, they have won just six Cups, and just one in the last 52 seasons.
Heading into this season, there is room for muted optimism, as the Bruins signed elite forward Elias Lindholm to a seven-year deal and physical defenseman Nikita Zadorov to a six-year contract, while parting ways with divisive forward Jake DeBrusk along with blueliner Matt Grzelcyk, center Danton Heinen, and goaltender Linus Ullmark. The latter departure means that franchise goaltender Jeremy Swayman gets the crease pretty much all to himself this season — assuming the club opens its collective wallet and signs the 25-year-old netminder to a lengthy extension.
Boston Celtics
Not much to say here. The team, originally put together by Danny Ainge and fine-tuned and upgraded by former head coach Brad Stevens, was a juggernaut this past season, coasting to the best record in the regular season and then flicking away all alleged competition in the playoffs to secure the franchise’s 18th NBA championship.
There is further bad news for the Celtics’ upcoming opponents in the 2024-25 season: almost the entire roster is returning and everyone important is signed long-term, and the two “J”s, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, should be hungrier than ever, and not just because they don’t want the 2024 banner to look like it was a one-off fluke. No, both have Summer Olympic hangovers, and are determined to offer up “I’ll-show-you” seasons — Tatum because he was significantly underused during the Summer Games in Paris by Warriors head coach Steve Kerr and his minions, and Brown because he wasn’t even selected to the team, even though he is a three-time NBA All-Star, has made an all-NBA team, and was the Finals’ Most Valuable Player on a world-championship team. So there.