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August 21, 2024
It would be a giant understatment to say that things have been pretty good for the Boston professional sports teams over the past 24 years. The Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins have won a combined 13 championships since the Patriots 2001 season. It's an astonishing number. During that time, a Boston team has been in a championship series (or game in the case of the Superbowl) a total of twenty times.
I wanted to quantify the successes and occasional failures of our local teams through the years so I looked at regular season winning percentages and playoff success between 1975 and 2023. Note that hockey and basketball seasons are assigned to the calendar year in which they ended while football seasons were assigned to the year in which they started. Baseball, of course, starts and ends in the same calendar year. Also note that the 2023-24 Bruins and Celtics were included in the graph above but not in the following analysis.
Here are the results for 1975-2023
In terms of regular season winning percentage, the best year was 2019. The four Boston pro teams combined for a winning percentage of .671 that year as the Red Sox, Patriots and Bruins each won at least two-thirds of their games. The Celtics won just under 60%. 1976 was the second best year with a .666 winning percentage. The years 1986, 2009, 2011 and 2013 rounded out the top six with winning percentages of .648 or better. The 2008-2013 period produced five of six years with winning percentages of .627 or higher.
The worst year for the four Boston teams was 1997. The four teams had an average winning percentage of only .415 that year. Only the Patriots finished over .500 that season. The year 2000 was the second worst season (.427) and 1992 was the third worst (.431). You could say that a switched was flipped in 2001. Since then Boston teams have won over 50% of their games in every single year.
During the 1980s, Boston teams advanced to the finals in their league eight times and won three championships (all by the Celtics). Only two Boston teams advanced to the finals in the 1990s (Bruins in 1989-90 and the Patriots in the 1996 season) with no titles. Boston won six titles in both the 2000s and 2010s decades. The Celtics just won the city's first title in the 2020s but my graphs in this section only go through the 2023 sports season.
The Bruins have been the most consistent team, finishing .500 or better in 43 of 48 seasons between 1975 and 2023. The Bruins finished above .500 in every season between 1967-68 and 2003-04 (37 seasons). Sadly, they only won the Stanley Cup in only two of those years. Both the Red Sox and Patriots have been .500 or better in 37 of the last 49 seasons and the Celtics are not far behind with 34 of 49 through 2023.
It will come as no surprise that best single regular season for any team was the 2007 Patriots. They were 16-0 which is the exceedingly rare 1.000 winning percentage. The best Red Sox regular season was the 108-54 club of 2018 (unlike the 2007 Patriots, they did win it all). The 1986 Celtics were 67-15 and also won a title. It's fresh in our memory, so you probably would've guessed that the 2022-23 version of the Bruins was their best team. Their incredible 65-win, 135-point season was cut short in the first round of the playoffs.
The low points since 1975 ... for the Red Sox it was their groteque 69-93 2012 season. The good news was that it was soon forgotten as they won the World Series the following year. The Patriots 2023 season was their worst since the 2-14 debacle of 1992 (they also went 2-14 in 1981). The Celtics dipped to 15-67 in the 1996-97 season. The Bruins have kept bad seasons to a bare minimum for over 50 years but they also found their lowest point in the 1996-97 season when they won just 26 games. What a long winter that was for Boston sports fans.
The Playoffs
I wanted to add an analysis of playoff success as well. To do this, I created a number called Round Advancement. This is meant to be a proxy for Playoff Rounds Won. The difference is Round Advancement includes playoff byes and advancement in the Major League Baseball playoffs when they had fewer than four rounds. For example, the 2010 Patriots received a playoff bye (no Wild Card game) then lost to the Jets in their first playoff game. In my calculations, that is one Round Advanced because of the bye. Major League Baseball had just two rounds of play from 1969 to 1993 (strike in 1994) and three rounds from 1995 to 2011. So the Red Sox will have a lot of Round Advancement where they didn't actually win a series. The 1990 Red Sox won the division and went straight to the ALCS where they lost to Oakland. This counts as a Round Advancement of two despite no series wins.
Using this system, the best year for Boston Sports was 2018 when the four pro teams advanced through 11 playoff rounds. The Red Sox and Patriots both won championships (four rounds each), the Celtics reached the Conference Finals (two rounds) and the Bruins beat Toronto in the first round before losing to Tampa Bay. The second best playoff year was 2013 (nine playoff rounds), highlighted by a Red Sox championship with the Celtics advancing two rounds and the Bruins three rounds into the Finals. Three years tied for third place with eight rounds: 1986, 2004 and 2011.
The worst years, with ZERO rounds advanced were 1993, 1997 and 2000. This was part of an incredibly awful stretch for the Boston sports teams. The total playoff rounds advanced between 1993 and 2000 was just nine. So the local teams had more playoff success in 2018 alone than those eight years combined. This is why I often become irritated when fans, mostly those who started following the teams in the early 2000s, complain about how rough they have it as Boston sports fans in the 2020s. They have no idea how bad it was.
I plan to update this analysis following the 2024 Red Sox and Patriots seasons so it will cover the full 1975-2024 period.
