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more pre-game reading material...

quote:

Originally posted by Spin Laden Boston deserves to win but of course I'm cheering for Van.

PUBLICATION: Vancouver Sun
PAGE: C3
DATE: 2011.06.15
SECTION: Sports
EDITION: Final
BYLINE: Cam Cole
SOURCE: Vancouver Sun
ILLUSTRATION: Ric Ernst, PNG / NHL leading scorer Daniel Sedin (left) has had to contend with big and nasty Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara during the Stanley Cup Final. The two players will battle one last time tonight as the two teams put everything on the line in Game 7.;
COLUMN: Cam Cole
WORD COUNT: 991

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Win or lose, Canucks deserve this; Make no mistake, Vancouver can make honest claim they are the best with Game 7 victory

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The first intermission of Game 6 was almost over. It was 4-0 Boston, the Garden party was well underway, and a well-respected writer from a neutral city who's in the Hockey Hall of Fame walked over and said:

"Let me ask you something. If the Canucks win Game 7, do you think they will deserve the Cup?"

It was such a surprising question, it took a while to figure out why it was asked, and a while longer to come up with what, I'm sure, wasn't much of an answer.

Deserve? Boy, that's one complicated word.

It usually comes up around voting time for the NHL Awards, or when the all-star teams are announced, or when the league office mulls a suspension for an on-ice crime of some kind or other.

Where opinions are involved, "deserve" is debatable.

Where the Stanley Cup is concerned, it is not.

If Henrik Sedin is being handed the Cup by Gary Bettman tonight at, oh, 8: 15 p.m. PDT, or later if it requires overtime -and why wouldn't it? -it will be because the Vancouver Canucks won one more game than anyone else in the playoffs after winning lots more games than any other team in the regular season.

It will be because they stayed the course, when Sami Salo tore his Achilles last summer and pieces of their defence were falling off with ridiculous regularity all season, and when Manny Malhotra suffered his horrible eye injury in March, and when Ryan Kesler likely tore his groin against San Jose, and when Dan Hamhuis fractured something or other hip-checking Milan Lucic near the start of this series, and when Mason Raymond broke a vertebra on a rough and awkward hit by Johnny Boychuk in Game 6 that the referees decided deserved no penalty and the league decided deserved no supplemental discipline.

Would the Canucks deserve the Cup?

You know why the question was asked.

It's because the Canucks have done a lot of it unimpressively, giving up more goals than they've scored in these playoffs -they're currently minus-7 -after being the No. 1 offensive and defensive team in the regular season.

It's because their power play, a bread-and-butter weapon in their march to the Presidents' Trophy, has been firing blanks, and those who get the most minutes of power-play time are bearing the brunt of the criticism for it. It's because Mike Milbury called the twins "Thelma and Louise," a proud moment for network sports television.

It's because the Bruins have romped in all three games in Boston, while the Canucks have eked out three one-goal nervewrackers at home, two of them 1-0 shutouts, the other requiring an Alex Burrows overtime marker.

It's because the argument has been made that, given a bounce or two, excluding Raffi Torres's goal with 18.5 seconds left in Game 1 and Burrows' goal 11 seconds into overtime in Game 2, the Bruins could have swept this series. And maybe that's true.

It's because of Burrows's bite and Maxim Lapierre's gesture and all the diving, and the inability of the Sedins and Kesler to flex their offensive muscles, and the fact that Roberto Luongo has been pulled four times in these playoffs, thrice lit up by the Bruins, and has failed to match the sure-footed pluck and clutch goaltending of Boston's Tim Thomas in this series ... and then crabbed about all the ink Thomas is getting.

Should a team that's fallen so short on so many levels -biggame production, personal comportment, class -and which is (so we hear) unloved by many in the Rest of Canada (though sensational TV ratings argue otherwise) be given the hero treatment if they rebound from their Boston embarrassments and win tonight?

And the answer, of course, is: why the heck not?

The Cup has been stolen before. The 1986 and '93 Montreal Canadiens come to mind. Jacques Demers was mightily ticked off to hear his '93 team referred to as the weakest ever to win the Stanley Cup. He should take it as a compliment.

That team won 10 straight overtime games in the playoffs. They were close to being down 2-0 in the final to the L.A. Kings -with Games 3 and 4 in California -when the series turned on Marty McSorley's illegal stick. They rode Patrick Roy like a rented mule.

Did the Habs deserve it? Sure. So did the 2006 Carolina Hurricanes, even though it took them seven games to beat the No. 8-seeded Western team, Edmonton, in the final.

But this? This would be no theft, no bolt from the blue.

At the moment that they clinched the Presidents' Trophy on March 31, while 14 other teams were still angling for playoff spots, here is what the Canucks had to show for their season:

Scored the most goals, allowed the fewest, had the biggest goal differential. Had the best home record, and the best road record. Were the best team 5-on-5, on the power play, and on the penalty kill. According to the NHL, no team since the Original Six era (which ended in 1967) had led in goals for and against, power play and penalty kill in the same season.

They had the NHL's top pointgetter (Daniel would win the Art Ross) and top playmaker (Henrik would lead the league in assists). They had the league's winningest goaltender with 37 wins, even though Luongo stepped aside enough times to make sure Cory Schneider got his 25 games in for the Jennings Trophy.

This was no accident, this Cup run.

It may have looked like one, lately, but there are no inexpensive trips to the Stanley Cup Final. Every player, every coach, every trainer, every equipment man pays a steep price.

If they win tonight, will they deserve it? Damn right they will.

And if they lose, they'll deserve that, too.

It's not up for a vote. It's whatever the final score says it is.

lol

quote:

Originally posted by Spin Laden

hehehe

four Canadian teams losing in recent years, is Toronto next? lolzzz

told some anteater chick few months ago the twins and Luogo were the weak links. We even suck at rioting

quote:

Originally posted by malek

see you at Sasha, gonna print it on a tshirt and wear it then

Winnipeg is are only hope... who knows maybe they can pull an Avalanche. Win the Stanley Cup the first year in town or Bettman wakes up one morning and wants US teams to only have American players and Canadian teams have Canadian players

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