Stanley Cup Finals 2011: 5 Frustrating Facts About Friday Night's Bruins Loss

There were a few things that were particularly frustrating from a Bruins fan’s point of view about the fifth game of these Stanley Cup Finals. The loss itself actually wasn’t one of them. Hard fought game, nose to nose, single goal, all-around great hockey demonstrating if nothing else that the two teams—and especially the two goalies—deserve to be where they are.

1) The single most frustrating aspect of the loss was the knowledge that it will absolutely prevent the hoisting of the Stanley Cup by the Bruins in Boston Garden on Monday night. Sorry, the TD Bank North Garden. Those TD folk paid for the privilege, so I suppose we should respect that, even if secretly those of us old enough to remember the last time the cup was hoisted there (1972) will never call it anything but the Boston Garden.

A corollary to this frustration is the unthinkable possibility that the Canucks will hoist that cup in Boston on Monday night.

2) On a personal level, having predicted Bruins in six, and its necessary game five victory in Vancouver, the loss was an unwelcome "cold shower" to my predictive foreplay—about as effective as the Bruins’ power play.

3) Bruins goalie Tim Thomas scored Vancouver’s only goal! The Canucks’ Kevin Bieksa, depending on who you ask, either completely missed a shot at the net, or deliberately bounced one off the back boards, and the rebound jumped onto the stick of Maxim Lapierre. Thomas moved to his glove side, reacting to Bieksa’s maybe, maybe not shot and actually got back quick enough to stop Lapierre’s actual shot. It plunked right into his chest, but he was falling backwards, and when he landed on his butt he twisted to his right. The puck, still moving, rolled off his chest as he flailed at it in an attempt to keep it from rolling into the net. It did, and for all intents and purposes, the game was over.

It didn’t help much to know that the goal was scored by a late-season acquisition of a player who’d never managed more than 15 goals in a season, and only scored six goals in the past season for three different teams: Montreal, Anaheim and Vancouver.

4) Why is that in five-on-five hockey, the Bruins generally manage to set themselves up into a box formation that facilitates pinball passing plays that put a puck on net, but with a player advantage, they look like a station wagon full of senior citizens asking for directions? Given that the Bruins play a lot better with five players on the ice, I am frankly surprised that Canucks coach Alain Vigneault doesn’t designate a single player he doesn’t need to pop in and out of the penalty box, tripping the first Bruin he encounters.

5) The Canucks have won each of their three victories by a single goal, and two of the three by scoring only once. Call me Lady Gaga, but isn’t it the more potent offense, as defined by multiple goals, that’s more likely to win a series of games? Apparently not.

Even the Canucks will acknowledge that these Stanley Cup Finals are far from over. The Bruins though are going to have to solve the problem of Roberto Luongo. He stopped 31 shots on Friday night, six more than Thomas, who had his streak of 110 minutes and 42 seconds of shutout hockey broken by a puck he put into the net himself.

The Bruins are in the situation they’re in on account of three—count ‘em, folks—fluke goals. You can point to last-second defensive lapses that led to them, but if defensive lapses counted, the aggregate score of these Stanley Cup finals would be approaching triple digits.

It’s hard to fault the overall defense of the Bruins when you consider that they’ve held the Sedin twins to a single point on a single goal by brother Daniel, who was the NHL scoring champion this year. They’ve also restricted Vancouver’s power play to a single goal on 25 attempts.

You either love or hate these do-or-die games. On the one hand, they are an absolute blast to experience, with enough adrenaline pumping from either your living room or seat at the arena to power the lights of a major city. On the other hand, they are agonizing, with that same adrenaline drilling a hole in your gut anytime a single camera catches 11 of the 12 players on the ice in a single shot focused on the goal crease.

I still contend that Boston will pull this off—road ice statistics of historic Stanley Cup Finals aside. Just to hedge my predictive bets, though, let me also predict that Monday night’s game will be boffo at the TV box office, draw more viewers to watch than any final in recent memory, maybe even as many as the 6 million or so that were said to have seen the Detroit Red Wings blank the Philadelphia Flyers in 1997.