Pardon me if I don't shed a tear with the Canucks after they were tagged for seven goals in a must-win playoff game.
Pardon me if I don't shed a tear with Vancouver goalie Roberto Luongo over his poor performance in being tagged for seven goals in a must-win playoff game.
Allow me not to excuse the overall failure of the Sedin twins, either. Both played well, but not well enough to win.
And if you don't mind my asking, exactly what was the Vancouver defence trying to accomplish? And as a bonus question, is there anybody, including Mats Sundin and Mike Gillis, who isn't now certain to a fault that Sundin is too old and too slow to be a contributing factor whenever the game moves to a higher speed level?
I know everyone is all kumbaya over the Canucks and its sad loss to the Blackhawks in Game 6 Monday night in Chicago, but rather than have me spell out what the problems are, let's go to a man who had a first-hand view: Canucks coach Alain Vigneault.
"We can't go shot for shot with them because they are too skilled, and they make excellent decisions with the puck," Vigneault said. "Their defensive game is really strong -- that's part of the reason our shots and our chances have been down and their transitions are excellent both ways, offence to defence and defence to offence."
Oh, and though he didn't say it in quite so harsh terms, the goalie wasn't very good either.
"Luongo is like the rest of our group," Vigneault said in discussing his goalie before the start of what proved to be the deciding game. "He has another gear he has to get to. He's our best player and he has to play accordingly."
Where I went to hockey school, that is known as "calling someone out." Having that someone respond with a seven-goals-against outing isn't exactly answering the call.
Truth be told, Vigneault should have included himself somewhere in that list of failures. He was up against an excellent coach in Joel Quenneville and didn't exactly outwit a master, but in the overall view he wasn't wrong.
The better team won and it won for a variety of reasons.
You can start by putting 21 goals past a 30-year-old goalie that should have been better.
But there's so much more.
Sure the Sedins got their points and they played well on more than a few occasions, but they were nowhere near the dedicated force that did everything possible, in both ends of the rink, than the younger and less experienced 'Hawks were.
In Game 6 particularly, Patrick Kane, a player as young as a new day and as slight as Rihanna in a car with Chris Brown, picked up his team and carried it on his back in the deciding period of the deciding game. Wasn't it Luongo or the Sedins or the wizened Sundin who was supposed to do that?
It's not that the Sedins (especially Daniel) didn't try. But they didn't trump Kane, a kid who played like he was driven to succeed.
The 'Hawks scored three unanswered goals, two of them by Kane, against a team that was supposed to be good at not allowing that to happen, especially when they claimed to have the all-world goaltender, the already anointed successor to Martin Brodeur on the 2010 Canadian Olympic team.
If you want to muster any real sympathy for Luongo, I found it in that period when I fully expected him to start yelling "get them off of me" like he was under siege by a plague of horror flick monsters who were on the verge of eating him alive.
Lest we forget, Kane is all of 20 years old and he delivers a hat trick in a Stanley Cup playoff elimination game. Don't remember Sundin doing that, but then again it's hard to remember when he was last in a Stanley Cup playoff game.
There are other things to be concerned about regarding Vancouver. Like for example: Is there some quit in them?
They had leads late in games and they couldn't build on them. They also blew late leads and you have to wonder how many Canucks were willing to pay a price not to let that happen?
It was clear the young 'Hawks players were guilty of mistakes as well, mistakes too numerous to mention in this limited space, but they atoned. Jonathan Toews, who is all of 21 years old, had two goals in this game and Kris Versteeg, who is the elder at 22, had one and was a pain in the Canucks backside throughout the series.
One can say the same regards puck-moving defenceman Brian Campbell, he of the massive free-agent contract. He came to these playoffs with the weight of the performance world on his slight shoulders and he delivered. Who on the Canucks blue line can say the same?
And didn't we see some of Vancouver's better role players self-destruct when the pressure was really on? Rick Rypien drew an interference penalty for checking Chicago pest Ben Eager into the frame of an open bench gate. He no doubt thought Eager had it coming, but was that the best time for a little payback? Even goons are supposed to know exactly when and how to extract a little revenge. That cost Vancouver a goal in the second period as did Willie Mitchell's relatively needless hooking penalty.
What, six games into the series and the Canucks still didn't know that the Chicago power play was just a tad more effective than say the one they regularly saw when playing the Calgary Flames?
Those weren't just lapses in judgment, those were costly mistakes, and the kind winning playoff teams don't make (see Detroit Red Wings as exhibit A in this regard).
The Chicago Blackhawks are the youngest team in the NHL and, by playoff standards, the least experienced.
Yet they were not only the better team, they were the smarter team and the more polished team and the more poised team.
If the Canucks want to cry about anything, they should shed a tear in that regard.
They were beaten by a team that shouldn't have known better as to how to conduct themselves in a tight and physical hockey series where every mistake matters and where reputations are made, not handed out like so many favourable media reports.
The Canucks were a team whose coach dared them to be great. Perhaps it would have helped had he taught them exactly how to reach such a lofty perch.
In that regard they still have a great deal to learn.
