CHICAGO – Forget history when you’re evaluating this Stanley Cup final.
How about opportunity?
The Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins each have the chance to stake claim to a title neither has held very much, if at all, during 176 years of combined existence: The best team of its generation.
While another championship this spring won’t completely lock that up — the Pittsburgh Penguins and Los Angeles Kings may yet still have something to say on the topic — it would unquestionably put either the Blackhawks or Bruins in pole position.
After all, one of those teams will soon become the first with multiple Stanley Cups over the last decade.
“From my perspective, it says a lot,” Bruins president Cam Neely said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s really easy to spend to the cap if the owners allow you. It’s making sure you’ve got the right guys.
“I think (Boston general manager Peter Chiarelli) has done a really good job of making sure we’ve got the right guys with the right character.”
The Bruins will ice a lineup featuring 17 players left over from the 2011 championship team in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final on Wednesday night.
There are more new faces in the Chicago dressing room. The city had barely finished cleaning up after its victory parade in 2010 — the first for the Blackhawks since 1961 — before GM Stan Bowman was forced to start picking apart his roster because of the salary cap.
However, the core of the team remains largely untouched, as does the coaching staff and front office.
Bowman remained patient after first-round exits the last two years and it appears to have paid off. They key players on the team didn’t want to see their window of opportunity close without making at least one more championship run.
“For them to say (last year) that we’re missing one or two pieces to the puzzle, we’re not going to break up this team yet … I think that was great faith from the management,” said Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane. “To keep that faith in us, I think gave us some extra motivation: ‘Hey, they left us together for a reason, let’s show them why.’
“Maybe that’s why we’ve had such a great year.”
By design, the NHL is not a league that can be dominated any more — at least not for any significant stretch of time.
Chicago was clearly the most dominant team this shortened season, going undefeated for 24 games out of the gate on the way to winning the Presidents’ Trophy. It is looking to become the NHL’s first regular season and playoff champion since 2008.
When you couple that with the earlier Stanley Cup victory, there is a case to be made that the organization is already in the midst of its most successful era ever.
The four Stanley Cup wins on its resume are spaced out — 1934, 1938, 1961 and 2010 — and the current group seems to be coming of age, which suggests it should be in the hunt for more titles in the years to come.
“We didn’t really know how good our team was (in 2010),” said Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews, who is still just 25. “We just went out there and we won games and the next thing you know we were winning the Stanley Cup. I didn’t really think twice about it.
“The last couple years, when you go through some tough times, you starting asking yourself so many questions about why you’re not having the same success.”
Clearly, they’ve found some answers.
Nothing speaks to how difficult it is to maintain success in the NHL today better than the fact Bruins winger Milan Lucic was convinced the core of the team would have been detonated had it not mounted a big Game 7 comeback against Toronto earlier this spring.
Now they are in the conversation for best team of the parity generation.
As an organization, the Bruins have been there before (albeit briefly) — winning titles in 1970 and 1972 with Bobby Orr-led teams before the Montreal Canadiens regained dominance later in the decade.
Boston does a good job of celebrating its history, but at least one of its top players doesn’t want to think much about what another title now would mean in the big picture.
“Honestly, I don’t really care about the history,” said centre David Krejci, the NHL’s playoff scoring leader. “We have a good team right now and we’re going to do everything we can to win this one. After the series, people are going to talk about (that). …
“It doesn’t really matter, you’ve got to live in the moment.”
No matter how you look at it, this is clearly a big moment for two of the league’s oldest franchises. The kind of opportunity in front of them doesn’t come around very often.
That fact doesn’t seem to be lost on anyone.
“Once you win the Cup once, you feel like it’s yours and you don’t want to give it up,” said Toews. “I think as a team and as an organization here in Chicago, we definitely want to prove that we’re that team that means business.
“We want to be in the hunt for it every single year.”