Doubting Thomas Or Loser-ongo?

Shoot The Puck!

Tim Thomas is approaching Kirk McLean's '94 record for saves in a single playoff run. This is incredibly positive news for the Canucks' chances. You remember '94, McLean faced all those shots in a heroic playoff effort but the New York Rangers won the Cup.

Have a gander at the list of the top five in this odd category:
1. Kirk McLean (Van '94) 761 saves
2. Tim Thomas (Bos '11) 700
3. Ron Hextall (Phil '87) 698
4. Olaf Kolzig (Wash '98) 696
5. John Vanbiesbrouck (Fla '96) 685

Notice anything common among the four goalies not named Thomas? Yep, none of their teams won the Cups in those years. Eventually all that rubber catches up with you and you may even win a Conn Smythe like Hexy did in '87 but odds are you can't win it all.

Keep shooting the puck and eventually Thomas will give up more than one goal in 60 minutes of play...as he has in all previous series in 2011. Just pray the goalie at the other end gives up one less is all any Canuck fan asks.

From Orr to Park to Bourque...to Chara?

Yes, Mike Gillis's plan to recreate the Carolina Hurricanes '06 Cup winning defence-by-committee may fail vs. the usual have a Norris Trophy type D-man and ride him to the Cup. Yet is Zdeno Chara so "dominant"?

Being able to shut down the Canucks' top scorers, Daniel Sedin and Ryan Kesler, can be answered more as follows--Dominik Hasek, Jr. It's simply the Zach GalapagoDaskalakis lookalike (go see my movie Hangover II playing now in a theater near Rogers Arena! Tuesdays--$7.50 all day!) in the B's nets is playing as well as the Dominator in his prime.

Chara and his D-partner, Dennis Seidenberg, are a collective +24 in the playoffs, but they better be buying Timmy Boy a few dinners should the silverware end up in Boston.
Daniel has had 16 shots on goal in the four games and, even if skewed by his eight shots in Game 1, that's still a pace that would place him 4th overall in the regular season for shots on goal.
Kesler has ten shots on goal so far through four games. That's pretty much his pace in the last series vs. San Jose. Maybe he is playing hurt but again maybe Thomas is making the saves that Antii Niemi did not, especially in those last two games of the Sharks' series when Kesler had a key goal in each game.

Woe Is The Powerplay

This often repeated mantra that special teams are soooooo important in the playoffs is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of games are played five-on-five. Powerplay goals are few and far between when teams get to the Final because most of the time the goalies teams face are actually very good. We won't even get into how good the penalty killers themselves are on good teams.

So then why don't the offensive players dominate?
Simply put, defence wins championships and has even when the Air Hockey Oilers or Flying Frenchmen dynasties were in vogue.
Yes, it'd be nice to see the Canucks score on the powerplay but more importantly is how teams play at even strength and NOT giving up backbreaking shorthanded goals at the most inappropriate points in the games.

Let's have a unscientific, but randomly fun look at how "important" the powerplay is in the Final:

'87 Final
Edmonton Gretzkys vs. Philly Keenans

Philly outscored Edmonton on the PP 6 goals to 4 but gave up 3 shorthanded Oiler tallies.
At even strength the Oil outscored the Illka Sinisalos 15-11 in the series.
The powerplay was a factor in Game 2 with the Oil's lone PP goal in regulation being part of a 3-2 OT win. Other than that is was pretty much a wash in each game. Philly even potted its lone goal in Game 7 on the PP yet lost 3-1.

'91 Final
Mario Penguins vs. Not Dallas Stars

In the series Pittsburgh scored 7 powerplay goals but gave up 3 shorthanded goals.
Minnesota scored 3 PP goals and gave up 2 SH goals.
Yet the statistics don't tell the whole story as 3 of those Pens' PP goals were in the Game 6 clincher which was an 8-0 blowout.
Go back further, with Minny up 2-1 in the series they outscored the Pens 2-0 on the powerplay yet lost Game 4 by a score of 5-3.
At even strength the Pens outscored the Stars 27-16 in the series.

'08 Final
Detroit Zetterbergs vs. Pittsburgh Crosbys

The Pens outscored the Wings on the PP 5-4 in the series but gave up a shorthanded goal so that's a wash.
The Winged Wheels outscored the Flightless Birds 12-5 at even strength.
Game, set and Osgood to Detroit.

'09 Final
Datsyuk Wings vs. Malkin Penguins

Pens again outscored the Wings on the PP 4 to 3 plus this time the Pittsburghers potted a shortie of their own. This was a decided advantage in Games 3 and 4 where the Penguins' special teams helped win both games 4-2 as they scored that shorthander plus 3 of their powerplay goals vs. the Wings in the two home games.
Yet in the decisive Games 6 and 7, neither team scored on the powerplay in consecutive 2-1 wins by the Pens.
In the end at even strength the Wings outscored the Pens over the seven games 13-9 yet lost.

Draw your own conclusions, but of these four high profile Finals featuring winning teams that had the most offensive talent in the NHL at the time, only the one Final in 2009 could you say the powerplay was significant enough a factor to swing the series.

So far in the 2011 Final the tally is:
Boston 3 PP goals to Vancouver's 1.
Boston has scored 2 goals shorthanded.
At even strength Boston has a 9-4 advantage.

Even if Vancouver scored two more powerplay goals than Boston in each game, well, it'd still be 2-2. Just in case you're wondering.

Having A Final Eight Ball

If you think there are not many teams that give up eight goals or more in a Stanley Cup Final game and then go on to win the Cup, you'd be obviously right.

Strange thing, though, the first team to get an eight-spot scored against it since the NHL was involved in the Stanley Cup Final, actually rebounded from that huge loss and went on to win the whole kit and kaboodle...and there's a Vancouver connection.

In the inaugural 1917/18 season of the NHL the predecessor of today's Maple Leafs, the Toronto Arenas (I guess "Rinks" was already spoken for as a team nickname?) got thumped 8-1 by the Vancouver Millionaires (the Pacific Coast Hockey Association champs) in Game 4 of the then best-of-five Stanley Cup Final. The Arenas came back and won Game 5 2-1 to take the Cup.

In other weird bits of trivia, the two leagues that battled for the Stanley Cup back then played under different rules. The PCHA was a 6-on-6 skaters league and the NHL was like the current 5-on-5 skaters. The games alternated between being played under the two leagues' rules with the Cyclone Taylors winning the two games played under the PCHA "rover" rule and the Team That Would Become Leafs winning the three played under NHL rules. Due to biplanes not being a feasible form of commerical transportation yet, the entire series was played in Toronto that year after the Millionaires took the Pierre Berton Transcontinental Railway across to the Centre of the Then Much Smaller Universe.

Only problem is, if history does repeat itself and the losing team of this 8-1 defeat wins it all in 2011, hopefully next year's Final will not be a repeat of the Final which followed 1918's and resulted in no team winning the Cup, a flu epidemic and a player dying. And you thought this year's Final has had a lot of drama?

In modern times, only the New York Islanders and Montreal Canadiens have rebounded from getting ventilated for 8 goals against in a game.

In the Isles' first of their four Cups in a row, they lost Game 2 in 1980 to the Philadelphia Flyers 8-3. The Bob Nystroms bounced back to win three (all home games) of the last four to take the Cup in six games.

Hey, Sedins, technically I am "Swedish"

The Habs in one of the wackiest playoff games ever lost 8-7 at home in Game 5 to the Chicago Black Hawks (pre-"Blackhawks") in the 1973 Final. The goalies in that game--Hall of Famers Ken Dryden for Montreal and Tony Esposito for Chicago. This series does come with one Big M rejoinder. The Habs won Game 1 8-3 so technically giving up 8 in a one-goal game when you ventilated the opponent for 8 in another game that was a blowout sort of makes a moot Yvan Cournoyer of a point to all of this.

For those with your Stanley Cups half full of champagne, the Canucks could be headed for an '80s Islanders dynasty if they take the Cup in 2011. That could be helped along, if Coach V stops coaching like the Yogi Bear he looks like, and starts dressing seven defencemen. As canucks fans would like to see some insurance of the backline, you know in case an Aaron Rome gets tossed or a Dan Hamhuis gets injured during a game. Just a suggestion.

For those with your silver chalises half-empty, there have only been three teams (if we count the '73 Habs among them) out of nine who have given up 8 or more goals in a Cup Final game who've come back to win the Cup.

Even scarier is the fact no team since the '09 Pens (what?) has come back from 0-2 down in the Stanley Cup so.... we're long overdue ....Oh, forget it! The Canucks are toast. Doomed, I say.

Just to ring off on another low note here's something to overload your hockey trivia memory banks:
The famous 0-3 comeback Leafs destroyed the Detroit Red Wings 9-3 in Game 5 on the way to reeling off those four straight wins to take the '42 Stanley Cup.

So Tired . . . Tired of Waiting . . .

"I've waited all my life for this. We want the Cup!"

--random 24 y/o fan on Granville Street after Game 2

Yes, as soon as any person born in a B.C. hospital comes out of their mother's womb, they do put them in a "waiting" room which might have been decorated with Vancouver Canucks' memorabilia. Technically, then it has been possible you've been waiting for all 24 of your years for a Canuck Cup.

Without pulling too much rank, the rest of us who've actually been around the entire 40 seasons (well, 39 as we lost the 2004/05 season thanks to the lockout), I think we've been waiting most of our lives more for a team that could actually win more games than it lost in a season.

Consistently doing that seemingly simple task that even the St. Louis Blues have managed for most of their team's history would have been a start. Going on deep playoff runs more than every 12 seasons were things one could only dream of happening for the Canucks. To think we'd actually waste any precious time on Planet Canuck "waiting" for a Cup to actually be won is more something a fan with little grasp of reality had like, say, a Toronto Make Belief fan.

Honestly, since Roberto Luongo came over in a trade with Florida is probably when this particular Cup waiting period truly began for most fans. Finally, the Dan Cloutier era was over! Rejoicing could be heard from Burrard Inlet to the last spike at Golden that finally the missing cog in the Canuck machine was filled. After all, it's not like a lot of us expected the Luongo-era Canucks to win the Cup in 2011 given the lack of deep playoff runs to build a base of confidence on. The Canuck past playoff woes have been a hard nut for even this version of the team to crack.

Hey, Dan, the puck went five hole

That sad playoff history has been hard to shake. Back in 1975 it was a totally different story as two expansion teams made the Stanley Cup Final. Vancouver's '70/71 expansion cousin, the Buffalo Sabres, took on one of the "Expansion Six" in Philly's Broad Street Bullies, who were the defending Cup champs.

That '74/75 season saw the Canucks have a winning record for the first time in their history and actually win a playoff game against the mighty Montreal Canadiens. Things were looking up in Vancouver.

Then the Canucks fell to just a game over .500 in the following season and continued the fall from playoff grace to the "never bad enough to draft Mario Lemieux but as mediocre as they come" era. Even in the King Richard-led run to the Final in 1982, the Canucks were three games under .500 in the regular season.

No one expected anything of them in the "come one, come all" playoffs of that particular Air Hockey season. Thanks, though, to the Los Angeles Kings riding that Miracle on Manchester to a massive upset over the Gretzky-in-his-prime scoring machine Edmonton Oilers, the Canucks took full advantage of sudden home-ice advantage (getting to play the 17th placed Kings and then the 15th-placed Chicago Blackhawks in the next two rounds). Obviously, expectations to actually win the Cup vs. the two-time defending champion New York Islanders were close to zero. Well, if Harold Snepsts had not passed the puck to Mike Bossy (of all people!) in OT in Game 1, maybe...(oh, who am I kidding?) the Canucks would have won a game and lost in five instead of being swept.

Another nine seasons of under .500 hockey would come and go interrupted by one lone semi-highlight in 1989 taking the 1st overall Calgary Flames (who would go on to win the Cup that year) to a Game 7 OT before Joel Otto kicked the winning goal in while standing in the crease. Check the video.

It really wasn't until Pavel Bure in '91/92 came onboard would the Canucks have a legitimately good team...and an actual "I'm on the edge of my seat every time he touches the puck" hockey player (all due respect to Ron Sedlbauer's 40-goal '78/79 season). So I guess I will cut any Bure fan slack as their wait has been at least 20 years for the Canucks to win a Cup.

The rest of us are pretty happy we've finally got a team that has been winning on a fairly consistent basis. When I say "consistent," I'm talking in Canuck terms as the team has had seven losing seasons out of the past 19 since the day Pavel descended from Moscow to the West Coast.

Call me greedy, but should the Canucks finish the job in 2011 (please sweep...I can't handle a seven-game gutwrenching put the knife in, pull the knife out near Shakespearian tragedy), here's hoping that they don't turn into a Carolina Hurricanes' "one Cup and done" team.

Who's going to complain all that much because one Cup is more than our expansion buddies the Sabres have as well as the Kings, Blues, Capitals and Winnitoba Moosejets or Phoenipeg Jetyotes who also have no Stanley Cups...yet? I won't even mention the delusional fan base in the Centre of the Universe on their blue-and-white's post-expansion Cup drought.

Let's just say to all fans out there, there's "waiting" and then there's "waiiiiiiiiting" when it comes to Lord Stanley and the Vancouver Canucks. Just stop by Cyclone Taylor's grave and ask him how long he's been waiting for the Cup to return to Vancouver.

I'm tired of standing here since 1915!