second round, against Philadelphia. Enlisted for long-distance chauffeur duty to bring my youngest daughter home from college, I found myself in a restaurant—Café Bruges—in Carlisle, PA in the company of a bevy of bright and lovely young women . . . but with no television in sight. What to do? Surreptitiously receiving score updates via phone texts from my wife, I finally announced: “Sorry to end the party, ladies, but I’ve got to get back to my hotel room for some beauty sleep before tomorrow’s return trip to Boston.” That allowed me to catch the third period of the Bruins’ victory over the Flyers.It also gave me a strategy for other games where I had a scheduling conflict—such as my wedding anniversary (I was able to keep one eye on the small television over the bar at Spazio’s restaurant in Braintree), a friend’s retirement party, and the Honors Convocation at UMass Boston: in each case I managed to engineer a disappearing act that allowed me to catch the bulk of the game at home. But don’t I deserve some sort of credit for not bailing out altogether on those various social responsibilities?
Well, maybe my reward was simply that my beloved Bruins won the Cup. About 10
minutes after game 7 ended, my oldest daughter called me . . . from Thailand, where she had been tracking the score online. I told her that when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 I was happier for her and her sisters than for me: they were bona fide fans and were all old enough to savor the moment and to remember it; this one, I told her, was for me—almost a half-century of diehard loyalty rewarded! The morning after the game, I broadcast to the world a photograph of that aforementioned oldest daughter and me, snapped in 1988, with the caption: “This morning I feel . . . this young again!”Anyway, I have now watched game 7 three times in its entirety . . . and two more times mostly fast-forwarding to get to the goals and certain
other crucial moments. Pretty soon I’ll have all the nuances memorized. I find it apt that there is no single iconic moment—such as Bobby Orr’s goal in 1970—for this year’s championship: but the entirety of game 7 seems to sum it up—I can’t get enough of it! The series as a whole certainly produced lots of highlight-reel goals and saves and lots of video-clip equivalents of sound bites (and real bites—ouch); but for me, ultimately, the whole was far greater than the sum of even those scintillating parts. . . .All of that being said, I must proffer a few “analytical” thoughts about the final series. While the concussion-inducing hit on Nathan Horton in game 3 clearly motivated the Bruins and galvanized them as a team, it may have been a blessing in disguise in another sense in that it led to an odd case of “addition by subtraction”: it turns out the Horton was playing with a separated shoulder suffered in Game 7 against Tampa Bay. So the Bruins lost an already-wounded Horton but gained Shawn Thornton (toughness and tenacity) and Tyler Seguin (game-breaking speed and a scoring threat), both of whom were 100% and were desperately itching to play. It all worked out. Players had their roles, they knew their roles, and they played their roles . . . even while sometimes going above and beyond. As much as I’ve always liked Claude Julien as the Bruins coach (his interview responses are always thoughtful and articulate—in both English and French, no less), I don’t think there was a lot of genius involved on his part: it was more a case of discipline among the players along with a healthy dose of determination that carried the day. Also, somewhere along the way I told someone that I believed that “the hockey gods would ultimately smile on the Bruins”—and then added, “If they don’t, then I’m changing religions.”
Part of the basis for that “faith” involved the aforementioned playing of roles. I just re-re
ad a section of The Game, by Montreal goalie Ken Dryden, the Bruins’ nemesis from 1971. . . . Believe it or not, it’s possibly the best book of any sort that I’ve ever read. (I read it a few years ago, the summer Dryden was running for the leadership of the Liberal party in Canada. I also started a novel by another leadership candidate, Michael Ignatieff—which I have yet to finish . . . though probably I will go back to it someday. He eventually won the leadership . . . but was forced to resign a few months ago when the Liberals got utterly slaughtered in the Federal election.) One essential point that Dryden makes involves the philosophy—and the practice—of Montreal coach Scotty Bowman, who believed that the “speed” players (or “skill” players) needed to be complemented by muscle players.Here’s what Dryden writes: [S]peed is not enough. Quick players are often small, and in smaller rinks against bigger teams, are frequently subject to intimidating attack. Bowman knows that Lafleur, Lemaire, and Lapointe, players whose skills turn the Canadiens from a good team to a special one, must be made “comfortable,” as he puts it; they must be allowed to play without fear. So never farther than the players’ bench away, to balance and neutralize that fear, Bowman has Lupien and Chartraw, sometimes Cam Connor, in other years Pierre Bouchard, and of course, Larry Robinson. With a game-to-game core of fourteen or fifteen players, Bowman fine-tunes his line-up, choosing two or three from among the six or more available to find the “right mix,” as he calls it, for every game we play. He believes that a championship team needs all kinds of players, and that too many players of the same type, no matter how good, make any team vulnerable.
This was Vancouver’s problem. The Bruins had just enough firepower, thanks to Roberto Luongo’s leakiness in the Vancouver goal, to match up with the Canucks—and the Bruins also had Tim Thomas to counteract the Canucks’ “skill”; but the Canucks did not have enough physicality to match up with the Bruins. This seems to be the verdict in the Vancouver Sun as well. I’ll betcha that next year they add some muscle and some attitude. . . . In that regard, I feel bad for the Sedin twins—great “skill” players who took abuse both on the ice and off: the Vancouver GM might have spared them both kinds of abuse by building a better-rounded team. (The comments in the media and on call-in radio programs about the “Sedin sisters” and “Thelma and Louise” were mean-spirited and took away from the series as a matchup of worthy opponents, which is all that any true hockey fan would ask for.) I have been struck for years now by how much different playoff hockey is from regular season games—how much more physical to the point of being brutal. The Vancouver-San Jose series scared me because both of those teams were so “skill”-oriented; when the Canucks won that series, I was afraid that the Bruins would not be able to match up if the Canucks dictated a finesse game. It turned out the other way around. And the rest is happy history!
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