Boston Bruins on Paper: Blind Date

Hockey games are a great place to meet for a blind date, especially during the playoffs.

You can agree to meet by the Orr statue outside of the TD Garden, tell her that you’ll be the one in the Bruins’ sweater and ball cap, with a goatee.  If she still recognizes you through that maze of adrenalin junkies, you can always just act crazy.

If you seem a trifle unkempt and stressed out, you can blame it on Tuukka and the night can end quickly, both thankful that you found out now…

…if she’s a hockey fan, she will completely understand the beard bordering on wino trim, the bags under the eyes and the summer creases in your clothing, but you can’t blame anything on Tuukka Rask, nor any one of the Boston Bruins for your slobbish appearance, because she will know better.

She will know that the Bruins eliminated those arrogant Penguins from Pittsburgh in high style and in four games, giving both themselves and their fans a brief respite – a chance to get clean, have a good meal or two – Hockey chicks are cool like that.

Their life code reads like the NHL rule book, taking Rule 46 on fighting literally – you start the fight, they’ll finish it.  You’ll both take 10 minutes to cool off and then she will expect you to put it behind you, though she won’t…and if it works out you’ll realize one day that she’s turned you into a Barry Melrose clone…

…strutting stylish duds, slicking your hair back and developing an accent that prohibits pronouncing the word “against” with it’s phonetically correct soft a – breaking out your credit card with the spoked B logo on it to score tickets for Game 6…

…’cause you want to be there when the Bruins win the Cup.

Ah, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves – the thing hasn’t even started yet.  The Chicago Blackhawks are certainly the early favorites in the Vegas lines, but not by much, because the smart money can’t ignore the advantages that the Bruins hold when the game hits the ice – but they are both at a disadvantage when it comes to familiarity.

One of the repercussions of the protracted NHL lockout and subsequently amended schedule is that it was designed so that each NHL team played only teams within their conference, something that made no difference to anyone, anywhere – until now.

The Bruins have not played the Blackhawks this season, so the Eastern Conference Champions head into the Stanley Cup finals against Chicago with no choice but to treat it like a blind date, not knowing what to expect – except for what people tell them…

…and chances are those people are drama junkies, telling you just enough to keep you intrigued while withholding the creepy stuff so they can watch you squirm when “it” happens.

And that’s the thing, right?  We don’t really know what “it” is, though it will become obvious and apparent when it does occur, but by that time it’s too late – and the best you can hope for is that the swelling goes down quickly and that no one has taken pictures.

Nobody needs that, nor does anyone want that – So we have two days to find out as much as we can about these Chicago Blackhawks, trying to avoid all of the “interest” stories that take our focus from the task at hand – stuff like this being the first original 6 match up in the finals since the 1970’s and the horror of the last time a Boston area professional sports franchise faced a peer from Chicago in a championship contest…

…but this is different.  The Bruins have obvious strength and match up advantages in this series, where the Patriots didn’t stand a snowball’s chance when they met the Chicago Bears back in 1986 – the Pats taking an early lead in Super Bowl XX, then getting stomped like red, white and blue grapes by the big bad Bears and their players named for major appliances.

That will not happen this time, not with this gritty bunch of bears.  The Blackhawks may have won the President’s Cup for having the best record in the league, but much of that success was front-loaded as the Hawks accumulated points in an NHL record 24 consecutive games to start the season – and have been merely mortal since.

Their roster construction is similar, as were their paths to this point – so it goes to figure that many see this series too close to call.  But the wild card, at least in Game 1 in Chicago, is their unfamiliarity with each other, and which team forces the issue and dictates the pace in the opening moments of this game will carve a huge advantage for themselves for the series…

…other than that, the Bruins are clearly the deeper team and coming off an absolute punking of first the Rangers and then those Penguins – both heavy favorites and both breaking like cheap glass in the face of the Bruins’ physicality.

So, Bruins in six games – a conclusion that wasn’t difficult to come to, given the facts and information available –  but the truth of the matter is that this is a dream date for both teams and both are capable of skating off with the Cup – even if both are extremely fortunate just to be here…

…a blind date that offers itself to the notion of a classic, even if there promises to be plenty of little spats along the way.

But, why the Bruins?  Why will the bullies from Beantown be drinking from the Stanley Cup when all is said and done?

Next: Part 2 of 3 – The Neutral Zone…