Originally Posted by stuff99
Sedins accept blame for Cup failures
By Iain MacIntyre, Postmedia NewsJune 15, 2011 11:00 PM
Brad Marchand of the Boston Bruins checks Daniel Sedin of the Vancouver Canucks during Game 7 of the 2011 NHL Stanley Cup final. The Bruins won 4-0.
Photograph by: Harry How, Getty Images
VANCOUVER — They were still kids when they came to Vancouver, and we've seen Daniel and Henrik Sedin grow up and into world-class hockey players.
They were poor as players Wednesday night, but outstanding as people. The trade-off wasn't nearly enough to keep the Boston Bruins from rolling over the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 to win the Stanley Cup.
"No cheering in the press box" is one of sports journalism's oldest and most sacred mantras. But it was hard not to cheer for them in the dressing room, where the twins went through 30 minutes that were as painful as anything Boston defenceman Zdeno Chara and Dennis Seidenberg subjected them to over seven games.
The Sedins said their job was to score and they didn't. No excuses. They said they tried but weren't good enough. They took full responsibility for failing to deliver in the biggest game of their careers.
Henrik battled an injury during the playoffs. Given the chance to lighten the criticism against him by revealing what was bothering him, the Canuck captain said: "A scoring slump."
It's too bad all that character and accountability and dignity didn't translate to points in the final.
National Hockey League scoring champion and Hart Trophy favourite next week, Daniel had only one goal and three assists in the seven-game final. And Henrik, the last scoring champion and most valuable player, managed just a single goal.
Bruins centre Patrice Bergeron matched the Sedins' series goal total on Wednesday night alone.
"We had one thing on our mind tonight and that was to win and have a great game," Daniel told one of the unending waves of reporters in the Canucks dressing room. "We want to be the guys to win games for this team, and obviously tonight we did not do that. We needed to find a way to solve (Boston goalie) Tim Thomas. I think that was the biggest problem for us this series, and we couldn't do it. There's no excuse. It's our job. Our only job is to score and we came up short."
Scoring is not the Sedins' only job, but for a few more years it is easily their most important one.
Not only were they blanked in Game 7, they were on for all four Boston goals, leaving Daniel minus-9 for the playoffs and Henrik minus-11.
Henrik still led the Canucks with 22 points in 25 playoff games, and Daniel was second with 20. And until the final, each was a candidate to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. But Thomas won that in a landslide, and his work against the Sedins was the deal-closer.
"Maybe we tried to simplify things too much," Henrik said of the final-round scoring slump that infected the entire Canucks roster. "We tried to get shots and rebounds instead of sticking to moving the puck and moving our feet. We got away from that a little bit. When maybe the game was on the line, we tried to get a simple shot, which is good a lot of times. But with Thomas in there and the big D-men they have there, it's tough to get to rebounds.
"Boston is a great team. We were lucky we had (a lead of) 3-2 after five games. The games at home we were able to beat Thomas. But we couldn't find enough ways to beat them. We didn't come up maybe to our standards, but we were close. We played a great team.
"This is the toughest thing you can go through. That's why it hurts a lot to lose in the seventh game. You want to be back. This was the best time I had as a hockey player even though we'd been through a lot of bad stuff the last couple of weeks. We've learned a lot."
The Canucks are lucky to have these guys, as players and as leaders.
They arrived in Vancouver in 2000 and after their first three seasons, butchered by some critics who failed to see the character behind the slow-developing NHL skills, the Sedins wondered if they were going to fail in North America.
They never complained about that criticism, but it hurt them. So did their sense that they were letting down the team that spent second- and third-overall draft picks on them.
This final stings, too.
"I think this is worse," Henrik said. "It's the same, but worse, because back then we weren't even close to being where we are right now. We were so close to winning it all . . . and being seen as top players. We have to come back and battle through that (criticism) again, like we have all our careers. And that's what we're going to do."
They were still standing there in the Canucks' dressing room, accepting blame, taking responsibility, when reporters were returning to the Rogers Arena press box to write. Television screens showed that rioting had started downtown. Police cars were being overturned. Fires were burning. It was not our city's finest moment.
It made the Sedins seem even rarer.
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