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The Penguins, hockey and more, by the PG's Seth Rorabaugh. |

If you're a mostly neutral party, finding a rooting interest in this Stanley Cup Final has been difficult. Neither team is all that likeable. With the Canucks, you get the diving of the Sedins, the foot-in-mouth quotes from Roberto Luongo and the general slime-balltuity (That's a word. We're journalists. Trust us.) of Maxime Lapierre.
With the Bruins, you get... well... Boston.
Clearly, humanity in general has no horse to bet on in this race.
The Bruins themselves are a decent bunch of humans for the most part. If you're a Penguins fan, you might be rooting for old man Mark Recchi (right) to get one last Stanley Cup ring.
And Andrew Ference, another former Penguin, is going for his first Cup ring.
In comparison to the Canucks, the Big Bad Bruins like Zdeno Chara, Milan Lucic and others have been mostly inert teddy bears.
The only Bruins player who is even anything close to being despicable is Brad Marchand who proclaimed himself a "rat." But he even managed to do that in a cute, cuddly way.
And how can anyone outside the Pacific Northwest root against Tim Timmy Thomas? He's an everyman. He looks like one of us. A regular guy. You probably could go to that dek hockey rink on Route 22 in Murrysville and find 17 guys who look like Tim Thomas. It wouldn't shock us a great deal to see Thomas sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the parking lot after the game sipping on a red Gatorade and smoking a Marlboro.
His counterpart, Vancouver's Luongo (right), looks like a villain from the 'Jason Bourne' movies. And he has had approximately the same success rate as one of those characters as well. It wouldn't shock us a great deal to see Luongo sitting in a cafe after the game sipping cappuccino while reading a classified dossier with instructions on how to kill his next target.
But... it's Boston. The same self-important Boston which likes to tell the rest of the world how much better it is than everyone else at everything. Including at being self important.
The same Boston which gave us Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy who told us this year's Winter Classic in Pittsburgh wasn't as good as the previous year's Winter Classic in Boston. Because it wasn't in Boston.
And it's the same Boston which gave us this horrendous spoof of Wiz Khalifa's "Black and and Yellow:
Worshiping of Jack Edwards? Check.
Sense of self entitlement? Check.
Obligatory Red Sox mention? Check.
The characteristics of your typically loathsome Boston fan are all present.
That brings us back to Vancouver. A franchise forever cursed with mostly ugly jerseys did have one brief, bright period of aesthetically-pleasing outfits in the early- to mid-1990s. That apparently provided the inspiration for "Black Red Yellow:"
Anything which combines old school Pavel Bure and Trevor Linden jerseys with a Vancouver Grizzlies jersey has to be on the side of good. On top top of that, the "Black Red Yellow" version actually looks like something you would see on VH1. The quality and effort is evident. The Boston version of "Black and Yellow" is just some wannabe Southie poseur rhyming "goaltender" with "middle finger" while setting it to some fuzzy clips swiped off YouTube.
Begrudgingly, we'll be rooting for the Black Red Yellow tonight, even if it's now blue and green.
(Photo: Top-Bruce Bennett/Getty Images; Recchi-Elsa/Getty Image; Luongo-Jason Hayward/Canadian Press)

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You almost had me with Jack Edwards.