Cup Upset Was Strange, Not Inexplicable

The Stanley Cup finals that ended Wednesday were among the strangest ever, apart from what happened in the streets of Vancouver afterward.

The Canucks were favored, having won the regular-season title with the league’s most productive offense, its most efficient defense, very good goaltending by Roberto Luongo and excellent special teams. After a big scare in the first round against their bête noire, Chicago, they won 8 of their next 11 games to get to the finals.

Yet Boston wound up outscoring them by 23-8 (and by 21-4 in the last five games). The Bruins’ 15-goal advantage was the biggest for any best-of-seven finals in N.H.L. history. The previous record was the 13 by which the 1970 Bruins beat St. Louis — in a sweep.

The dimensions of the Bruins’ victory over the Canucks were those of a runaway sweep, not a seven-game marathon. Vancouver scored the fewest goals by a team in a seven-game series, and during the 420 minutes 11 seconds of play, the Canucks led for only 32:32, less than 8 percent of the time.

How did that happen?

The scrappy Bruins, backstopped by the game’s top goalie, Tim Thomas, planned to physically confront Vancouver, especially its mobile defensemen and the high-scoring Sedin twins, Daniel and Henrik. The Canucks, with players like Alexandre Burrows, who bit the finger of Patrice Bergeron in Game 1, gladly took up the challenge.

One result was the most rancorous Cup finals in a couple of decades. It was less about the best hockey of the year and more about biting, taunting, slashing, cheap shots, late shots, high-sticking, slew-footing, diving, embellishing, brawling, trash-talking and name-calling. Pushing and shoving after the whistle became the norm, and by the end, the teams had combined for 342 penalty minutes, the most in the Cup finals since 1986.

Before Game 7, the TSN analyst Bob McKenzie called the series “Revenge of the Twerps,” noting that the two best skaters for each team through the first six games were superpests, Boston’s Brad Marchand and Vancouver’s Maxim Lapierre.

Although they won the first two games at home, the Canucks’ fortunes went downhill immediately. They lost defenseman Dan Hamhuis in Game 1 after he injured himself by flipping Boston’s Milan Lucic over his back. Coach Alain Vigneault moved Aaron Rome up the depth chart, but he had trouble with the pace against frontline players.

In Game 3 in Boston, Rome’s mistimed check concussed Nathan Horton, earning an ejection and a four-game suspension. For the second time, Vancouver had to play with five defensemen and began to tire, giving Boston too much space, which the Bruins exploited by displaying unexpected skill in an 8-1 victory. Thomas’s play early in the game made the outcome possible, and Marchand’s short-handed tally broke Vancouver’s spirit.

Game 4 was more of the same, with Thomas stopping everything en route to a 4-0 shocker in which Marchand scored and later clotheslined Christian Ehrhoff and lowbridged Daniel Sedin on the same play.

Luongo sparkled in a 1-0 decision as Vancouver took a 3-2 series lead. But returning to Boston, he again turned porous behind additional defensive blunders, and the Bruins won, 5-2. Marchand scored the first goal and later repeatedly punched Daniel Sedin in the head.

In Game 7, the home-ice pattern was broken when Bergeron and Marchand each scored twice in a 4-0 victory, capitalizing on the battered Canucks defense and little response from the Sedins.

The shutout was Thomas’s second of the finals, and he set records for most saves in the playoffs and in the finals. It is worth noting that Daniel Sedin took 27 shots in the series, more than any other player, but Thomas, the most valuable player in the postseason, stopped 26 of them.

After Thomas, the best player and most compelling figure was the 5-foot-9 Marchand. His 11 playoff goals, second most for a rookie, and 19 points were essential, but his physical agitation symbolized the temperament of these strange finals.

Thomas finished the finals with a save percentage of .967. His overall save percentage in the playoffs was .940, best among all goalies. And that came on top of his .938 mark during the regular season, an N.H.L. record.

Such sustained excellence may have been made possible by Thomas’s relatively light regular-season workload, 57 games. No Stanley Cup-winning goalie in the last seven years has played as many as 63 regular-season games.

A City Where Rioting Is Oddly Familiar

Americans reacted with surprise that Vancouver, site of an Olympics featuring huge street parties suffused with good feeling, could descend into the kind of sports rioting seen in recent years in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Boston and Montreal, and at Ohio State, Michigan State and several other universities.

But Vancouverites are all too aware of their city’s history of rioting, and not only over lost hockey games.

In addition to Wednesday’s chaos and the 1994 Stanley Cup mayhem after the Canucks lost Game 7 to the Rangers, the police and protesters clashed during a 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference and in 1998 over a visit by Jean Chrétien, then prime minister of Canada.

In 2002, fans made a commotion when Axl Rose did not show up for a Guns N’ Roses concert, rioting after a Rolling Stones concert in 1972 and so on going back through the years.

“It’s terrible,” Henrik Sedin, the Canucks’ captain, said after Game 7.

The next morning, hundreds of volunteers cleaned up broken glass downtown, and the Vancouver police were receiving thousands of tips identifying the rioters.