NHL Playoffs

[Asher]

IIRC, the Canucks have lead the Bruins for, literally, 1 minute of play in the first three games, despite being up 2-1. Luckiest team in hockey history.

[Asher]

sv%! Stat. I know you keep a running total.

Because I know you won't...

Luongo: 0.919
Thomas: 0.932

Luongo's sv% is 6th in the playoffs, behind such established stalwarts as Jimmy Howard and franchise goaltender Dwayne Roloson.

He is also 6th in GAA, behind the venerable Michal Neuvirth.

[Asher]

Tim Mother****ing Thomas



The Globe has an article up calling for a strong suspension of Rome: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sport...9783/comments/

The comments on the article are almost entirely Canucks fans who, unsurprisingly, insist it was perfectly clean and Horton deserved it. Further, this is clear example of bias against the Canucks by the NHL and by the G&M. Many of them also keep wailing about how it's the Bruins that art the dirty team.

[Ben Kenobi]

IIRC, the Canucks have lead the Bruins for, literally, 1 minute of play in the first three games, despite being up 2-1. Luckiest team in hockey history.

Yet they've never trailed in the series. Lucky or not, you can't lose if you never trail.

[Asher]

Yet they've never trailed in the series. Lucky or not, you can't lose if you never trail.

I don't even need to respond to this, do I?

[Asher]

http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/nhl/article/1003768--cox-dirty-hit-turns-around-stanley-cup-final?bn=1

Dirty hit turns around Stanley Cup final

Aaron Rome had to be thinking he was going to give his team a game-changing lift with a spectacular, mid-ice bodycheck on a top opposing player.

Well, the 27-year-old journeyman defenceman changed the game all right, but not for his team, the Vancouver Canucks.

Instead, Rome’s vicious head shot that knocked first-line Boston forward Nathan Horton unconscious and sent him to the hospital may have been a historic moment that alters the course of a 2011 Stanley Cup final that has suddenly turned rather nasty.

It was as brutal a hit as there’s been in a Cup final since Scott Stevens laid out Paul Kariya back in ’03, the difference being Kariya got up and later played on. And it produced the most lopsided score, 8-1 in favour of Boston, seen in the final in 15 years.

What the longer impact of the hit — beyond Horton’s health and an 11 a.m. hearing on Tuesday for Rome — and the score is, well, we’ll have to measure that starting with Game 4 on Wednesday.

“I’d rather lose 8-1 than in overtime like they did,” said a surprisingly flippant Henrik Sedin, referring to his team’s Game 2 triumph at the 11-second mark of OT.

Maybe. Roberto Luongo did stop that 150-footer off the stick of Dennis Seidenberg — barely — to avoid his very own Dan Cloutier moment. But a Bruins team that couldn’t score for the first 89 minutes of the series seemingly couldn’t stop putting pucks past Luongo in Game 3 on Monday, pulling the home team into a series in which they trailed two games to none going in.

To the Canucks’ chagrin, Rome’s hit was similar to Raffi Torres’s hit on Brent Seabrook in the first round in that it seemed to wake the victim’s team up and galvanize them as a group, and we know Chicago almost crawled all the way back from 0-3 in that series.

Rome’s hit was “under review” after the game, and he’ll have a hearing Tuesday prior to what has got to be a certain suspension. Both Sedin and head coach Alain Vigneault acknowledged Rome’s hit was “late,” while Boston head coach Claude Julien went further.

“I think it was a blindside hit that we’ve talked about taking out of our game,” he said.

The decision will fall to league executive Mike Murphy because his boss, Colin Campbell, has always recused himself from games in which his son Gregory, who plays for the Bruins, is involved. There will be great debate over the legality of the hit — Rome got a five-minute major for interference and a game misconduct — that will be furious enough that Brendan Shanahan may well reconsider taking over the role of league disciplinarian next season.

The Rome hit occurred seemingly out of nowhere five minutes into the first period in a game that had not, to that point, developed any specific tone or temperature.

Horton picked up the puck in the neutral zone and just before hitting the Vancouver blueline, he moved it to Milan Lucic on his left. Nearly a full second later, Rome’s left shoulder crashed into Horton’s jaw, with the Canucks blueliner seeming to either leap or, at the very least, lift upwards for maximum explosion into Horton’s upper chest and neck area.

Horton might have been knocked out on impact. But as he fell to the ice, his head struck the frozen pond with frightening violence. He then lay on his back on the ice clearly unconscious, his arms extended, a truly frightening sight.

The ugly incident overshadowed many other compelling elements of the game, including Tim Thomas’s more conservative and effective goaltending approach, Vancouver’s dreadful power play (now 1-17 in the series), Luongo’s dreadful night and 43-year-old Mark Recchi’s two-goal performance.

But the Rome head shot, which came on the heels of Alex Burrows’ unpunished Game 1 bite on Patrice Bergeron, once again illustrated the unappealing side of this very talented Vancouver team. The Canucks go overboard on the dramatics to draw penalties and, in these playoffs, have also demonstrated a clear willingness to do just about anything to not only win, but eliminate key personnel from the opposing team.

Even worse, it’s Vancouver’s bit players going after the best of the other team, like Torres on Seabrook. You could ban Rome for three years and it won’t help Boston replace Horton if he can’t play in the club’s first appearance in the Cup final in 21 years.

Fortuitously, the league’s GMs will meet in Boston on Wednesday to discuss a variety of issues, including toughening up Rule 48, the NHL’s so-called head-shot rule.

This is a Boston team, of course, that is naturally sensitive about these kind of plays, having lost Bergeron and Marc Savard to brutal head shots in the recent past. On both occasions, the perpetrators were punished either little or not at all.

They deserve justice this time. But in this scenario, it’s hard to see what justice might be.

[Ben Kenobi]

Hey asher, would you say that Boston's performance in the series has grown more than exponential growth? Or was it super exponential?

[Asher]

That question makes just as much sense as your last comment.

[Asher]

http://www.karolinagames.com/horatio/show.php?id=0f3531e044e8

The 8-1 loss is the 2nd worst loss in SCF history since the league epanded in 1967.

[Supr49er]

I thought it would be hard to root for the Bruins, but it's really easy to root against the Canucks.

[Asher]

Horton has a severe concussion and is obviously out for the rest of the playoffs, and realistically out for much of next season, too.

Fun stat: H Sedin is 7 for 26 on offensive zone faceoffs in the Boston series. Clutch.

[Asher]

Man that's a pretty goal.

[Asher]

Aaron Rome gets a 4-game suspension. He's done for the year, obviously.

[Guynemer]

Now for the de rigeur Luongo post-immolation re-immolation.

[Asher]

The suspension is by far the longest in NHL SCF history. All prior ones were 1 game.