Photo credit: Getty Images

By now, you’ve probably heard that the Caps should be afraid of the Boston Bruins. If you haven’t, the Bruins will tell you so themselves! Every once in awhile, there comes along a team that’s completely convinced that they are the Broad Street Bullies reincarnated, and who’s to say they aren’t? As we know, tough-guy posturing is an actual hockey skill, and the Bruins have been beating the Caps cold in this category all year, if not beating the Caps in many actual hockey games.

We’ve already profiled Milan Lucic, the power forward who is a known threat to players wearing twenty extra pounds of pads, but let’s take a look at the team as a whole, the schoolyard bullies of the NHL, the Cobra Kai to our Karate Kid.

Many analysts have predicted that the Caps will be no match for the Bruins’ legendary blueline, featuring such impenetrable bastions of defense as Joe Corvo and Greg Zanon.

Photo credit: Naoko Funayama

The Caps should especially be wary of Boston behemoth Zdeno Chara, who is well known for the clever defensive maneuver of being a tall person. There is perhaps no player in the league whose reputation is so cartoonishly exaggerated impressive, and the Caps should make every effort to avoid a crushing hit or a blazing slapshot from the Bruins defenseman, or cricks in their neck from looking up at him.

Washington will also have to watch for the scoring prowess of Tyler Seguin, who led the team this year with 29 goals (otherwise known as “an Ovechkin down year”). Seguin is a feared sniper with a nose for the net. Known weaknesses: tequila, alarm clocks, spelling.

Seguin’s partner in drunken bad decisions, Brad Marchand, will also be an impossible obstacle for the Caps, as he’s an accomplished agitator and nobody behind the Caps bench knows anything whatsoever about being a pest.

Photo credit: Reuters

This faultless team is led by Claude Julien, a modern-day tactical genius and the author of such brilliant defenses as “he started it” and “well, they’re just stupidheads”. If there’s one person who’s been unfailingly humble about the Bruins’ reputation, it’s the Boston coach, always quick to insist that he is coaching a team full of innocent lambs who never do anything aggressive or wrong.

As you can see, it’s absolutely impossible for the Caps to beat the Bruins in a postseason series. They are an unstoppable machine composed of flawless parts, and absolutely not a team previously sustained by mindgames, bullying, and a hot goalie. There’s nothing to be done, the Caps must simply wave the white flag. After all, every analyst in the entire world can’t possibly be wrong, can they?