get your goddamned band off of my goddamned wagon

The moral of the Stanley Cup story, to me, was the Canucks were vastly overrated.

Oh boy. Here it comes. (Regular Peter King readers will be glad that at least this time he didn't bury the lede...)

Vancouver was 12-10 in its last 22 playoff gamesHe gets, right, that if they'd gone 13-9 over their last 22...they would have won the Stanley Fucking Cup?

.... Outscored 64-49 in those 22 games.

Those 22 games, the majority of which they won.

Outscored 17-7 in the final four games of the first round against Chicago. The Bruins outscored them by 15 goals in a seven-game series. How does a team with the league's highest-paid goalie, Luongo, allow 21 goals in the Bruins' four wins in the series?

Uhm...their defensive corps gets riddled by injury? Their second-best defensive center plays injured and their best defensive center comes back from a seriously terrifying eye injury? That goalie puts up two goddamed shutouts in 7 games?

After the first 10 minutes of the first game of the finals, I just never saw the free-skating, fast, crisp-passing team I'd been hearing about throughout the playoffs. And the Sedins. I'm not going to call them names, but they came up smaller than LeBron when it counted in this series. In the final five games of the finals, when the game was on the line (the score within a two-goal margin), here was the Sedin twins' stat line: zero goals, zero assists, zero points.

Okay, sure, they sucked in this bizarrely baroque and byzantine scenario. But the Sedins, Luongo, and the rest of the Canucks were one goddamned game away from winning it all. (For two consecutive games, actually.) Describing their goalie as bad or their best forwards as underwhelming seems somehow to fail to capture that essential fact.