Canucks let dream season go to waste

VANCOUVER — Whatever the Vancouver Canucks have planned for their 41st anniversary season, it will be hard to top this one.
Pity about the ending.
Flummoxed, frustrated, driven mad by an inability to shoot, run, throw or otherwise squeeze a puck past Boston goaltender Tim Thomas for most of seven straight games, the Canucks let a dream season go to waste Wednesday night, losing Game 7, 4-0, and the Stanley Cup on home ice to the Boston Bruins.
Thomas, the runaway winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy, was near enough to impregnable the whole series, turning the last two winners of the Art Ross Trophy — Henrik and Daniel Sedin — into non-issues, and when the autopsy is performed on the Canucks, it is there that the scalpel is bound to be inserted first.
The league’s regular-season-leading offence scored four goals in the first two games, and just four more in the last five. Boston outscored them 21-4 in Games 3 through 7.
Any questions?
Given that paucity of offence, goaltender Roberto Luongo would have had to be all-world for the Canucks to win the series, and among critics who thought the team stood a better chance with rookie Cory Schneider between the pipes, he wasn’t even all-Vancouver.
In the final act, the Bruins leaped to a 3-0 lead over two periods on a pair of goals by Patrice Bergeron, one short-handed, and another by amazing rookie Brad Marchand — and the twins were on the ice for all three.
Marchand added one into an empty net at 17:16 of the third.
Bergeron’s goal was the first game-opening goal given up by the home side in a series in which home teams had held serve throughout. That the exception happened in Game 7 wasn’t only ominous, it must have put this thought into the Canucks heads:
“Now we have to get TWO past him.”
It wasn’t going to happen.

Apart from Thomas’s virtuosity, and the ace work of the shutdown defence pair of Zdeno Chara and Dennis Seidenberg, the Bruins played such sound positional hockey in the defensive zone, many a quality Canuck scoring chance turned to dust.
Vancouver had much of the early play but had little to show for it, and then the Bruins got a goal out of nowhere at 14:37 of the first period — a backhand pass from Marchand that went between two Canucks’ skates right to Bergeron, who whacked it in off the post. And though the fans stayed in the game, for a while at least, the Canucks seemed to lose their legs.
Early in the second, Marchand sped around the Vancouver defence and rang a shot off the near-side post, and while the Canucks were thwarted on their few really good chances — Thomas stopping Henrik Sedin, some, Chara blocking an Alex Burrows try for an open net — Boston pounced on theirs.
Marchand scored on a wraparound, which Luongo actually knocked into his own net, and then on a slow-motion short-handed break, Bergeron split the Vancouver defence, was hauled down by Christian Ehrhoff, and somehow the puck continued into the net with Luongo gesturing as if to say: “What just happened?”
All of Vancouver must be wondering the same thing.
The season in Vancouver was all about celebrating 40 years of NHL history — with a subtext including the word “Cupless” — but the drought was just one year shorter in Boston, where the Bruins last won in 1972, the second championship of the Bobby Orr/Phil Esposito era.
If there’s some consolation in the result for Vancouver — and it may be months before the wounds heal enough to recognize it — at least the Cup has gone, as it has the last four years, to a U.S. city where it will be appreciated and honoured, maybe even loved.
Detroit, Chicago, and Boston, three great Original Six markets — and Pittsburgh, among the best of the second six — is a pretty decent run of good American hockey towns, maybe making the Canucks’ loss marginally easier to swallow than Calgary’s 2004 loss to Tampa or Edmonton’s to Carolina two years later. But only marginally.
The Bruins, though, did this with no help from history.
From the very beginning of the series, they showed no respect for the Canucks’ gaudy regular season numbers, pounding the Vancouver skill players at will with little fear of retribution. All of the Bruins’ wins were lopsided, and they outscored the Canucks 23-8 in total.
With the Sedins neutralized, the task of supplying offence fell to the second line, which in happier days consisted of Ryan Kesler, Mikael Samuelsson and Mason Raymond. But Samuelsson was lost in Game 5 of the second round, Raymond was knocked out of the series with a fractured vertebra in Boston on Monday, and Kesler was a ghost of his ordinary, feisty, speedy self after injuring his groin in the Western Conference final.
The city was throbbing with nervous, edgy energy hours before the puck dropped Wednesday. Most of the hundreds of thousands who crammed into streets, lined up for last-minute liquor or to get into watering holes, were too young to have suffered all the previous years of Canuck disappointments, but they were ready to erupt, nonetheless — in joy or sorrow, delirium or anger, depending what transpired up on the giant screens scattered through the downtown area.
We may not know until the sun comes up whether it was a good thing or bad that the Canucks failed, in the end, to provide even a drop of added fuel for the explosion.
Vancouver Sun