Boston Bruins Outlast Vancouver Canucks, Win Stanley Cup in Game 7

"We didn't lose to the British, and we're not going to lose to British Columbia."

I won’t mix words.  I write this article while drinking a bottle of champagne.  I didn’t buy it earlier today in anticipation of this moment, in fact, it found its way into my refrigerator by chance.  Or fate.  Who knows?  All I know is right before Game 6, I saw a ladybug on the left front tire of my car and suddenly had a great feeling.  Later that night, the Boston Bruins won by scoring four goals in a little more than four minutes in possibly the weirdest Stanley Cup final game I’ve ever seen.

Yesterday was more or less a meaningless day for me.  When I woke up on Tuesday, I felt sick…I just wanted it to be Wednesday so badly.  That night I was doing my dishes thinking about the upcoming Game 7 and thinking “Jesus, it’s only 6 o’clock!? How long can a day last!?”  That’s when I looked up and saw another ladybug on the ceiling.  All I did was smile.

You can call me crazy.  In fact, that’s probably the proper response.  There has got to be a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for the presence of ladybugs in a humid continental climate during the midst of June.  But my Mom was the first one to tell me that ladybugs were good luck and to this day I still believe her.  I had no other way psychologically to deal with the pressures of this impending Game 7.  Again, crazy may be the first adjective to pop up here, but in all honesty, I had to find some way to vent my anxieties, and quell them.  I wanted to believe and the ladybug made me.  No matter what they do, fans have zero control over what is going to happen, so maybe that’s the reason why we believe in crazy things like ladybugs.

Granted, in an earlier article I pointed out that the hometown crowds were the real heroes of this series.  But Game 7 changes everything.  You have to throw out things that mattered earlier in the series.  And after all, humans are only human.  For the Bruins, the only thing that was more important than notching the first goal was scoring the second.  Had the Vancouver Canucks been able to score and tie the game at one, things might have played out differently.  Nonetheless, when Boston scored first the air and energy quickly left Rogers Arena.

Sadly, Vancouver will have to endure another defeat that, ironically, Boston fans can sympathize with.  During any given Game 7, you look for two types of players.  Who is recognizing the moment and taking their game to the next level, and who is too shaken by the pressure.  Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand were clearly amongst those who fit the first description and they made their presence felt.   Marchand set up Boston’s first goal on a face-off win by Bergeron.  He then scored himself in the second period off of a nifty and patient play to put Boston up 2-0.  Later with the Canucks on the powerplay, Bergeron slipped off on a breakaway.  He had enough momentum that as he was dragged down to the ice (already being called a penalty) the puck still found its way into the net.

Instead of taking advantage of the game’s first powerplay, Vancouver found itself down by three goals.  I’ll let my bias creep in here for a minute.  I can agree that Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara’s check on Vancouver forward Ryan Kesler was illegal.  He was penalized for it – but the only reason I found it surprising was because it was Game 7 and there were already four or five plays on both teams that would have gone as penalties earlier in the series.  Nonetheless, Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas was not about to let Vancouver back in the game, especially after his teammates had given him a comfortable lead.

I’d like to think that I’m a caring person, so despite all of the hatred, I wanted some reason to feel bad for the Canucks.  But that quickly subsided.  Instead of losing gracefully, Vancouver’s players decided to lose like losers.  Jannick Hansen had reason to be upset that a high-stick wasn’t called on Zdeno Chara in the 3^rd period as they crashed the Boston net.  In fact, Hansen’s lip was bleeding.  But let’s be honest, it’s Game 7 and Chara was already penalized for a slightly dicey call.  My Dad always taught me that the retaliator always gets caught.  I never learned that lesson, but anyway, Jannick Hansen didn’t either because his decision to lay out Andrew Ference behind the play only landed him in the penalty box with his team still down by three goals.

Then there’s Dan Hamhuis.  Who knows if he meant to or not, but early in the third period he skated into the butt-end of Tim Thomas’ stick and did his best Colin Firth in attempt to draw a penalty.  That didn’t work.  He showed his sportsmanship later in the period by taking an unwarranted shot with his stick to Adam McQuaid’s testicular region.  I only bring these incidents up for one reason.  Like I said before, at the end of the day, I wanted to respect the opponent my team had beat.  But I couldn’t.  Irony has its way of making itself immutably clear.  This is from an email that my Dad sent me before Game 7:

“'I’ll predict that goalies aside one or more North Americans will be game MVPs.  I don't know whether it's a good thing for hockey, but the Europeans can't seem to translate their talents into playoff effectiveness.  Maybe they were just too good where they came from - without peer - and so they learned to do it on their own when crunch time came, and that doesn't get you to the Cup.  Look at the guys who have stepped up, on the Bruins for starters, but even for Vancouver - would you say Americans Kesler and Higgins (aspirando et perseverando!) (and maybe Andrew Alberts) have been their best players (i.e., kept playing when others kind of folded the cards)?  Dominic Moore and Martin St. Louis...?”

I couldn’t agree more.  It’s not like there aren’t any Europeans on the Bruins.  But if it’s going to come down to that, I’d rather take a Slovak and Czech – both who come from countries that rid themselves of oppressive Soviet rule – over a couple silver spooned Swedes (Sedin twins) and a Dane (Hansen).  Since Seidenberg and Ehroff are both German, we’ll consider that a wash.  And let’s be honest, Germans have always been kind of scary.

I don’t want to make this into some transnational cultural piece; on the contrary, this Stanley Cup shows once again that hockey is truly an international sport.  But I can’t help feeling like the dominant football (I mean, soccer) culture of Europe didn’t ultimately do in the two players who were so crucial for the Vancouver Canucks all season, Henrik and Daniel Sedin. They’ve proven they can lead their team to the top record in the regular season, and lead the league in scoring. But they haven’t shown they can win when it matters most.  I thought Chris Higgins was one of the best players for the Canucks in this series, and that’s not just because we went to the same high school, it’s because it seemed like he really wanted it.

But I digress.  In the end, the credit belongs to the Boston Bruins, most of all Tim Thomas, who joins Brian Leetch as the 2^nd American player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as MVP of the playoffs.  To harp on the failure of the Canucks only takes away from how solidly the Bruins defense core played in this series, especially in Games 6 and 7.  Although he didn’t find his way on the score sheet in Game 7, Rich Peverley and the rest of Boston’s first line played exceptionally again.  They were only outmatched by the performance of Shawn Thornton, Gregory Campbell, and Daniel Paille.  Boston’s fourth line proved instrumental.  If everyone elevates their game with everything on the line, it will show itself when the fourth is out there.  In fact, the whole team played great in Game 7 – kudos to Claude Julien.  Once again, I’ll point out that I always felt the Bruins were built to wear teams down and they certainly did so to the battered Canucks.

“…good thing Tim Thomas is a god from Mt. Olympus.”  That was part of a text message I received from the legend Tim Beneski during Game 1 of this series.  How can I refute?  I can’t possibly begin to explain how else Thomas made some of the saves he did.  In a sport that is so dependent on the whole team executing, no other individual is more important than the goaltender.  If you believe in the hockey gods (I do, I believe in all sports gods actually) then you had to believe that Roberto Luongo ruined his chances when he made a certain comment about Thomas after Game 5.  Obviously, he looked downright terrible in Game 6, but there was reasonable explanation that he just had some hex on him in the TD Garden.  I even believed that.  The player that scared me the most entering Game 7 was Luongo.  But he looked nothing like the man who put up a shutout in Game 5.  The crowd knew it too.

On the other hand, Tim Thomas adds two more records to his storied season – the most saves in a postseason and the most saves in a Stanley Cup final.  When asked if the hit on Nathan Horton changed the series, Thomas replied that he hadn’t thought about it enough.  He barely had time to digest anything yet.  But it was easily the turning point of the series and it doesn’t really matter if it’s an injury, a goal, or a penalty kill – a turning point is a turning point.  It’s a chance to redefine one’s purpose, to refocus one’s goals.  The Boston Bruins did just that.