Remember how much the Bruins and Canucks hated each other during the 2011 Stanley Cup Final? While it’s been years since Bruins vs. Canucks has felt like any sort of rivalry on the ice, it appears there’s still a bit of a rivalry there off the ice for those who played in that series.
Some of that 2011 bad blood got boiling again this week thanks to then-Bruins captain Zdeno Chara and then-Canucks defenseman Kevin Bieksa.
It started earlier this week when Chara went on the “Games with Names” podcast with Julian Edelman and Sam Morril and shared an interesting story about something the Canucks did that motivated the Bruins during that Cup Final.
“After losing two games in Vancouver, we saw players from Vancouver coming on the ice in the Garden, and they were actually practicing how they would be lifting the Cup and handing off the Cup to each other,” Chara said. “And we found out about these things and we were like, ‘F--k this, we are not going to allow this to happen.’ It just fueled us.”
That would indeed make for some all-time bulletin-board material… if it actually happened. Bieksa has now adamantly denied that any such thing ever happened multiple times in the last couple days, most extensively on “Hockey Night in Canada” on Saturday.
“I don’t think I have to spend a whole lot of time discrediting that this didn’t happen, because logistically it’s impossible,” Bieksa sai. “You think about all the media that’s there covering the Finals, and all the competitiveness of trying to find some story different than the other person — clearly somebody would’ve reported about that, or had a camera.
“Even Chara walks it back a little bit with his comments, from ‘We saw them in the Garden’ to ‘We heard’ to ‘We believe we heard.’”
Bieksa went on to call Chara’s comments disrespectful and “an attack on our character,” and said he was disappointed that Chara would say or even think the Canucks did something like that.
“You know, originally I was upset to hear about it, because it’s a little bit of an attack on our character as a team and an organization, but also our leadership group,” Bieksa said. “You’re talking about three first-ballot Hall of Famers in the Sedins and (Roberto) Luongo. You’re talking about (Manny) Malhotra and (Dan) Hamhuis and myself. To think that we would allow something like that to happen, let alone participate in it, is disappointing coming from a guy like Chara.
“You would expect more, and maybe a little bit more mutual respect, that he wouldn’t repeat a story like that, that’s so insulting to us, without fact-checking it or seeing it or witnessing it firsthand. So, I think the main emotion I have right now is just disappointed in him.”
While Bieksa does have a point when he says that someone else probably would have seen or heard about it at the time, none of it really seems to be worth getting all worked up over 11 years later.
The most logical explanation here is that someone probably told the Bruins the Canucks were practicing their Cup celebration, and in that moment no one cared if it was true or not because everyone’s looking for that little extra chip on their shoulder that they can use for motivation.
It’s similar to Bill Belichick’s famous Super Bowl XXXIX pregame speech when he told the Patriots that the Eagles had already planned their championship parade. It didn’t matter if it was true or not. It didn’t matter if Boston or other cities did the same exact thing given the planning required for such a big event.
Either way, it’s clear that there’s still no love lost between the combatants in that epic seven-game series, which ended with Chara and the Bruins lifting the Cup on Vancouver’s ice.
“I wouldn't say dirty, they were just like maybe a little bit too, how should I say, maybe cocky is not the right word, but they were having a chip on their shoulders,” Chara said during the podcast appearance. “They had some players that had some reputation of being role players and agitators, and not really backing up the way they played. But they were good players. It was like they did some stuff that really, really fueled us.”
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