History with Maple Leafs could help Bruins snap short playoff slump

BOSTON (AP) — The Boston Bruins may have found just the solution to their playoff slump: A first-round matchup with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Bruins haven't lost a playoff series to Toronto since 1959, winning six straight series that have helped extend their Original Six rival's Stanley Cup drought to more than half of a century. Boston won all four regular-season matchups with the Leafs during the regular season — all motivation, no doubt, for Toronto to turn things around.

“I think just with the history we’ve had with them recently, they’re probably our biggest rival now over the last decade,” Bruins captain Brad Marchand said Thursday as the team began practicing for the Saturday’s series opener.

“It definitely brings the emotion and the intensity up for the fans. It’s a lot of fun to play,” he said. “It’s always extremely competitive. You never know which way the series is going to go. But that’s what you want and what you love about hockey.”

Although the outcomes have been one-sided, the Bruins have had to work for their victories.

Boston also won back-to-back seven-game series in 2018 and ’19. In their first-round matchup in 2013, the Bruins rallied from a three-goal, third-period deficit in Game 7 and won in overtime.

“Completely new game and a new season,” Auston Matthews, one of five Toronto holdovers from the last matchup five years ago, told the Canadian Press after the regular season-ending loss to Tampa. “Do our due diligence and make sure that we’re recovering and ready.”

The lopsided history raised questions about whether the Bruins engineered a matchup with the Leafs by losing three of their last four games of the season. That dropped Boston out of first place in the Atlantic Division — and a potential matchup with the more dangerous Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Bruins haven't advanced in the playoffs since 2021 — despite setting NHL records for points and wins last season.

Marchand thinks it would be foolish to underestimate Toronto.

“Nothing you do in the season has any bearing on what’s going to happen in the future,” he said. “You start getting caught up in the past, whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to affect your play. You need to stay in the moment, playoffs time.”

Matthews is turning his attention to the playoffs after falling short of his bid for 70 goals, going scoreless in back-to-back losses to end the season and finishing with 69.

“The most important thing is the team and the team’s success, making sure I’m pulling my weight as a leader on this team and help the team win,” he said. “That’s where my focus is at.”

Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said he doesn’t measure Matthews’ contribution in goals.

“I know there’s been a lot of focus on him reaching 70 goals; you kind of lose sight of how well he’s played,” Keefe said. “It wasn’t meant to be, and that’s OK. Sixty-nine is an unbelievable season.”

The Bruins aren’t saying who will start in net, though indications are that they will at least begin by rotating Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman.

“Our goalies know what the plan is,” general manager Don Sweeney said. “They know what their strengths are for our hockey club and how much we rely on them. And performance and results will dictate some of this. But we know what the plan is going in. And we’re comfortable with it.”

The Bruins goalies have alternated this season, except when injuries necessitated an adjustment. Swayman, who played three of the four games against Toronto, was 25-10-8 overall in 43 starts with a 2.53 goals-against average and Ullmark was 22-10-7 in 39 starts, allowing 2.57 goals per game.

Ullmark was the playoff starter last year, when he won the Vezina Trophy after leading the Bruins to a record-setting regular season. But after he allowed six goals in 32 shots in a Game 6 loss to Florida, Swayman started — and lost — the first-round clincher.

“We’re very confident in our goaltending,” Sweeney said. “I think it’s been a strength of our hockey club, certainly the past two years.”

Both teams finished up the regular season on losing streaks.

While Boston lost three of its last four, Toronto dropped four straight to finish third in the Atlantic, seven points behind the Bruins and still four points better than Tampa Bay.

“Definitely not how we want to be playing going into the post-season,” Matthews said. “I don’t think we can just think we’re going to turn it on.”

Toronto is hoping to build on last year’s postseason, when it beat Tampa in six games to advance for the first time since 2004. The Bruins are hoping to forget last year, when they set NHL records with 65 wins and 135 points but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by Florida.

“Looking back, we definitely looked at going on a long run and preparing for a long run," Marchand said. “Looking day to day, it’s definitely a lesson we can learn and build upon.”

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Toronto Maple Leafs' Auston Matthews shoots against the Tampa Bay Lightning during the first period of an NHL hockey game Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Tampa, Fla. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe speaks with Auston Matthews (34) during the third period of the team's NHL hockey game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Tampa, Fla. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP)

Boston Bruins left wing Brad Marchand (63) skates with the puck against Washington Capitals defenseman Martin Fehervary (42) during the first period of an NHL hockey game, Monday, April 15, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman (1) defends the net during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Washington Capitals, Monday, April 15, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

Boston Bruins goaltender Linus Ullmark drops to the ice, but fails to make the save, on a gaol byy Ottawa Senators left wing Jiri Smejkal during the second period of an NHL hockey game Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

BRENTWOOD, N.H. (AP) — Jurors heard closing arguments Thursday in a landmark case seeking to hold the state of New Hampshire accountable for abuse at its youth detention center.

The plaintiff, David Meehan, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later alleging he was brutally beaten, raped and held in solitary confinement at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades.

Meehan’s lawyer David Vicinanzo told jurors that an award upwards of $200 million would be reasonable — $1 million for each alleged sexual assault. He argued that the state’s clear negligence encouraged a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence.

“They still don’t get it,” Vicinanzo said. “They don’t understand the power they had, they don’t understand how they abused their power and they don’t care.

But the state’s lawyer said Meehan’s case relied on “conjecture and speculation with a lot of inuendo mixed in” and that zero liability should be assigned to the state.

“There was no widespread culture of abuse,” attorney Martha Gaythwaite said. “This was not the den of iniquity that has been portrayed.”

Gaythwaite said there was no evidence that the facility’s superintendent or anyone in higher-level state positions knew anything about the alleged abuse.

“Conspiracy theories are not a substitute for actual evidence,” she said.

Meehan, whose lawsuit was the first to be filed and first to go to trial, spent three days on the witness stand describing his three years at the Manchester facility and its aftermath. He told jurors that his first sexual experience was being violently raped by a staffer at age 15 and that another staffer he initially viewed as a caring father-figure became a daily tormenter who once held a gun to his head during a sexual assault.

“I’m forced to try to hold myself together somehow and show as a man everything these people did to this little boy,” he said. “I’m constantly paying for what they did.”

Meehan’s attorneys called more than a dozen witnesses, including former staffers who said they faced resistance and even threats when they raised or investigated concerns, a former resident who described being gang-raped in a stairwell, and a teacher who said she spotted suspicious bruises on Meehan and half a dozen other boys.

“The rot started at the top," Vicinanzo said Thursday. “The fish rots from the head. The tone starts there.”

The state called five witnesses, including Meehan’s father, who answered “yes” when asked whether his son had “a reputation for untruthfulness." Among the other witnesses was a longtime youth center principal who saw no signs of abuse over four decades, and a psychiatrist who diagnosed Meehan with bipolar disorder, not the post-traumatic stress disorder his side claims.

In cross-examining Meehan, the state’s attorneys portrayed him as a violent child who continued causing trouble at the youth center and a delusional adult who is exaggerating or lying to get money. In her closing statement, Gaythwaite apologized if she suggested Meehan deserved to be abused.

“If I said or did anything to make that impression or to suggest I do not feel sorry for Mr. Meehan, I regret that,” she said. “It was my job to ask difficult questions about hard topics so you have a full picture of all of the evidence.”

Her approach, however, highlighted an unusual dynamic in which the attorney general’s office is both defending the state against the civil lawsuits and prosecuting suspected perpetrators in the criminal cases. Though the state will be relying on Meehan's testimony in the criminal cases, it has tried to undermine his credibility in the current case.

Continuing in that vein Thursday, Gaythwaite reminded jurors that log books and other records indicate Meehan sustained a groin injury in playing football in 1998 and not from a rape in which he said he was knocked unconscious and left on an athletic field. It wouldn’t make sense for multiple staffers to coordinate their reports, she said.

“Even if all those folks were motivated to help someone cover up a crime, are you really supposed to believe they could pull it off?” she said.

“Do you know any governmental agency anywhere that could be that efficient and that organized?” she said. “We couldn’t even get our witnesses here on time to court.”

But Vicianzo pointed out that the staffer who initially documented the injury had been promoted despite an ombudsman's recommendation that he be fired for hitting a teen.

"The denial, the entitlement of our state government, our state bureaucrats, is unbelievable,” he told jurors. “It’s hard to accept. You don’t have to accept it, and I’m confident you won't.”

The jury will begin deliberations Friday after hearing further instructions from the judge.

FILE - The Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, N.H., stands among trees, Jan. 28, 2020. Jurors on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, heard the final witness in a landmark trial seeking to hold the state accountable for alleged abuse at the facility. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)