The 2011 Boston Bruins reunited Tuesday night to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, reliving their historic triumph. It was a booze-fueled good time, a perfect reminiscence of that core’s glory days.
Less than 24 hours later, the Vancouver Canucks’ story was told in a far more depressing manner.
NHL insider Elliotte Friedman put together a two-part, must-read oral history of the 2010-11 Canucks for Sportsnet.com. Of most interest to Bruins fans with an appetite for schadenfreude would be Part II that dropped, oh, roughly 10 hours after the red wine stopped flowing on the Bruins’ Zoom party.
Here are a few of the biggest Cup Final-related things that stood out from Friedman’s brilliant work.
The Canucks were riding high after winning Games 1 and 2 — like, really high
A lot of the heartbreak for Vancouver is that it couldn’t have started the series any better. The Canucks, according to just about everyone, were the more talented team, and they compounded that by winning Games 1 and 2 at home. Heading back to Boston, some truly believed they’d be returning to British Columbia with the Stanley Cup a few days later.
“I’m like, s—, we might sweep these guys,” forward Ryan Kesler said.
Longtime Canucks coach/staff member Eric Crawford told Friedman “After Game 2, (we) were saying, ‘Holy s—, this might happen.'”
Aaron Rome’s suspension remains a sore spot
The series turned — in the Canucks’ eyes, at least — on a couple of things: One was the Game 1 injury to veteran defenseman Dan Hamhuis. The other was a four-game suspension handed to Aaron Rome after the veteran d-man knocked out Bruins winger Nathan Horton early in Game 3. Horton didn’t play again, and neither did Rome, who apparently cried when he learned he’d been suspended for the rest of the series.
Kesler also thought the suspension was way too much.
“It pisses me off to this day,” Kesler told Friedman. “It was a body check. It’s not like he crosschecked him in the head. And I thought it was clean.”
He wasn’t alone.
Then-general manager Mike Gillis thought it was a “perfect NHL body check at the time.”
Oh, and then there was this from blueliner Kevin Bieksa.
“This might not be a popular opinion, but if that happens in Vancouver, I don’t even think it’s a penalty,” he said.
More Bruins: Best One-Liners, Chirps From 2011 B’s Reunion For Cup Clincher
Excuses, excuses, excuses
Vancouver has spun itself into somehow believing that winning Game 5 — which gave the Canucks a 3-2 series lead — ended up costing them. According to some of the players in the story, the distraction of having to go back to Boston with a chance to win the series was a burden of some sort.
“When we went to Boston for Game 6, we didn’t have the proper focus,” assistant GM Laurence Gilman said. “The parade route was getting planned and which network was going to have it. We brought the players’ families in a day before the game. We were fighting with the league. We were fighting with the Bruins. Things fell apart on us at the absolute worst time.”
Of course, the injury excuse also got plenty of run.
“I still think to this day, if we stayed healthy, we walk away with the Cup easily,” Kesler claimed, per Friedman. “All of those injuries, any other team that happens to, they get swept. We took it to seven still.”
Interestingly enough, the Canucks’ injury problems actually came up during the Bruins’ Zoom call Tuesday night, but that was quickly refuted by members of the B’s, who basically said: “We were dealing with our own stuff, too.”
Oh, and the travel.
“The travel, I think, caught up to us, and there’s nothing you could do about it. That’s just the way it is,” longtime member of the organization Stan Smyl told Friedman.
Of course, the Bruins also were making those cross-continental trips. Granted, the Bruins didn’t have to travel as far in their first three playoff series that year, but they were likely running on fumes themselves at the end of their third seven-game series of the playoffs.
Some credit for the Bruins, too
Raffi Torres, of all people, tipped his hat to Bruins goalie and Conn Smythe Award winner Tim Thomas.
“The f—ing guy was like a magnet. Pucks would not go in, they were sticking to him,” Torres said. “There was no rebounds. We’re like, ‘This is unbelievable. You can’t score on this guy.’ He was so good.”
That’s just a (long) snippet of the full story, which you definitely should go read in its entirety.
