Heartless

"Swedish twins are only good for one thing"--Dave Kinnaird

Congratulations to the Boston Bruins, who fully deserved their Stanley Cup. A shout-out to Tim Thomas, who put on a goaltending display for the ages in the final.

To Vancouver...your Canucks are almost there. Almost. You are missing one critical ingredient necessary for a championship, and that is GRIT.

What may have looked like grit at the end of the regular season, the gruelling playoff revealed to be mere dirt.

Grit looks to hurt teams on the scoreboard. It doesn't accept half measures. It blocks every shot, finishes every check, takes the hit to make the play, and doesn't back down.

Dirt doesn't have grit's skill or compete level, so it cheats. It tries to physically cripple the other team's best players. Faced with gritty play from the opposition, dirt dives to the ice and whines pathetically at the referees. Above all, dirt lets grit get to it.

When Aaron Rome hit Nathan Horton--a hit that was arguably clean, but for the fact it was so late it was early--I actually muttered to myself, "there you go, Boston, it's your Cup now." That wasn't the first dirty play out of the Canucks this final--Burrows the biter springs to mind--but it was easily the most ill-considered. To that point, Boston had been sleepwalking. Losing one of their best players to a concussion woke them up. Never poke a sleeping bear.

We saw dirty play after dirty play out of the Canucks. Kesler, normally an extremely talented player, decided halfway through the final that he would prefer not to play hockey and instead took up competitive diving. Last night, Chris Higgins elbowed Zdeno Chara in the head. Chara is 6'9". To throw an elbow to his head, Higgins actually had to leave his feet. Strangely, there was no penalty on the play.

And Luongo...don't get me started. In the wake of what, unsurprisingly, turned out to be his team's last good showing, he actually told the media that the single puck that had beaten Thomas that night "would have been an easy save for me". I read that and my nose ejected coffee. Did he just chirp one of the best goalies in the league? Did Roberto Luongo, the guy who had been ventilated twice in Boston, just suggest that ANYTHING to do with making saves is easy for him?

Grit has heart; dirt does not. From top to bottom, it was as if the Canucks had faced a Mayan priest prior to game three. Their hearts were ripped out. The Sedins looked nothing like the dynamic duo that had telepathically torn up the league. Luongo couldn't stop a beach ball in Boston. Meanwhile, on the Bruins, Mark Recchi at 43 was outhustling Canucks less than half his age; Brad Marchand was suddenly a goal machine. Even much-maligned Tomas Kaberle picked it up in the final. And Thomas--eight goals in seven games. Not too shabby.

So Boston is full measure for their Cup. And of course there was a riot in Vancouver last night.

Personally, I think anyone who destroys public property should have their own property destroyed. Burn a car, have yours torched. Of course, many of the festive folk last night would have had to explain this to Mommy and Daddy.

Mobs disgust and infuriate me. I've seen a few firsthand from my dark days (and darker nights) at 7-Eleven, and if anything makes me want to engage in mindless violence, it's mindless violence. That's the problem with mobs: the mentality is virulently contagious. It's why you wouldn't have caught me within thirty miles of the G20 summit in Toronto: even idiots knew there was trouble brewing, which is why so many of them gravitated towards it. (Yes, I know there were people arrested for no reason at all...and that also happens every time there's a summit. Lesson: stay well the hell away.)

In other countries, nonsense like what went down in Vancouver last night would be met with lethal force. There aren't many instances when I regret leaving in this peaceful country called Canada...