Results tagged “zdenochara”

Sure, if you win the Stanley Cup, you get your name engraved on it, you get to take it home for a day to do whatever you want with it, and kids from Yellowknife to Halifax go to bed dreaming of it. But still, when your year is over, you usually have to give it back. Usually to the Red Wings.

Can Bostonians ever get enough news about competitive athletics? In a word, no. Bostonist told you all about the Saturday hapsfrom the TDBNG, Tampa and the track. Yes, there is more to tell.

Sometimes, it takes a little while to remember how tense playoff hockey can be. When the Canadiens tied the Bruins 2-2 late in the second period last night, it all came back to us. Phil Kessel and David Krejci had staked the B's to a 2-0 lead late in the first.

Imagine for a moment that Zdeno Chara is standing in front of you. You are the only thing between him and a net. He's winding up for a slapshot.

There was playoff intensity at the Garden last night. Sure, the playoffs are months and months away, but when the Canadiens come to town, it's always lively, especially when the home team is playing the way the Bruins are playing now. (Which is kind of hypothetical, since the Bruins have never played this well in our fanlifetimes.)

Well, it had to end sometime. The Bruins' longest winning streak since 1973 came in emphatic fashion, as the boys were outworked and outplayed by the Sabres at the Garden yesterday. Buffalo scored twice early, and it was a hole the B's never got out of, as they didn't get a lot of shots on Justin Miller and flat-out missed some of the shots they did get.

"Did you see the Slovak on Slovak battle?" Single best remark we heard after the Bruins skated to another win at the Garden (their eleventh straight - the longest such Bruins home streak since any of us can remember) on Saturday night.

"We can beat anybody in this league and we can play against anybody, obviously," says Zdeno Chara. And who's going to argue with him? The Bruins finished off the Best November Ever by sending the Stanley Cup champ Red Wings home, as they've sent so many other teams home lately, sad and unfullfilled. So the month ends with the B's 11-1-1, picking up 23 out of a possible 26 points.

Two local teams in action last night, two overtimes. As usual, we'll start with the one that ended well.

We were worried? Remember, last season the Bruins were 0-37-1 against Montreal in the regular season, and still managed to force the Habs to seven games in the playoffs. 1-8 against the Angels in the regular season? Pfffft.

If you ever wondered if the Garden is freezing cold when there’s no ice in the rink, we can answer that question for you – it is and we’re still trying to thaw out. Last night we neglected to bring our winter coat when we attended the second annual State of the Bruins, a town hall meeting for the season ticket holders to find out what’s expected this season from the black and gold.

Passionate baseball fans like to know the ins and outs of their teams, the little things that may come to play roles in final scores and performances. But we'd hoped that we'd heard the last discussions about a Red Sox player's sleep schedule last year, when we learned that Dasiuke Matsuzaka was having a tough time transitioning from Japanese beds to their American counterparts.

There's been a lot of praise heaped on Bruins goalie Tim Thomas this year, and it's all been deserved. The guy's been a huge reason why the B's are still very much in the playoff hunt. But man is mortal, and Tim looked anything but great last night in Florida, giving up four goals in 12 shots through two periods. His defense was far from blameless, but Tim's been great at covering for their mistakes. Not last night.

Is it just us, or does it seem like whenever the Bruins have the spotlight to themselves, they lose? When they play the same night as the Celtics, or Patriots, they're fine, but give everyone else the night off, and it feels like we always have to lead with a Bruins loss. Maybe it's just us. But they deserve better.

So much for the idea that the thrilling shootout win over Buffalo would spark the Bruins. They followed up that great win with an official stinkeroo last night, turning a 3-2 lead into a 6-3 embarassing loss at the hands of the Panthers. Zdeno Chara, Glen Murray (yay!) and Marco Sturm scored for the B's, but then the defense broke down and Tim Thomas stopped looking like himself for a while. Bad news all around.

The good news for the Celtics is that the Timberwolf portion of their schedule is in the history books. After surviving a 1-point game against Minnesota at home a couple of weeks ago, the C's went to the Twin Cities and pulled out a 2-point win.

This morning, the Patriots are headed to Phoenix. Most of America is uncomfortably embracing a New York team as "good"'s only hope against "evil", while we're just waiting and anticipating that Tom Brady will eventually show up and rejoin the team. (We think he will; it's not Manny we're talking about here.)

In a way, it doesn't feel right; the Colts should perhaps be in town today. They are(were) the defending champs, after all. They gave the Patriots the first in a long stretch of runs for their money that the Pats survived. The Dungy-Belichick and Manning-Brady rivalries are about the biggest stories in sports in this young century.

Ask Bill Belichick about last week's game, and you may as well be asking him about the Treaty of Ghent. Ask him about the 14-point-underdog Chargers, and you may as well be asking him about an All-Star team composed of the '85 Bears, '89 49ers and the Justice League of America. You know what you get from Coach Bill when you ask about football. But apparently, ask him about team fight songs and you hit a nerve.

All right, we get it. Now we know that even if we check the Celtics score and see that they're up 14 on the Wizards with six minutes to go, we can't just take that for granted, switch back to the Lost Season 3 DVD and go to bed untroubled. We have to check again and make sure they sealed the deal.

Jeez, can't a guy catch a break and land 16 more votes? Poor Jim Rice. The man listened to the annual chorus of "maybe next year" time and time again while his Red Sox teams tried to bring home a championship; now he has to listen to the same call again, for the 14th time, as he wonders whether he'll ever get voted into the Hall of Fame. Once again the MVP could have been voted in. Once again it didn't happen - and the margin separating him from official baseball immortality was a tiny little margin.

Maybe some voters in Iowa had a tough decision to make; not so the AP NFL Coach of the Year voters, who swept Bill Belichick into the award with 29 out of 50 possible first-place votes. The other 21, we're sure, were dismayed by Spygate (why else vote against a guy whose team didn't lose?), figuring that any coach who had footage of 20 minutes of Jetball had an unfair advantage. Bill, we're sure, took the award, nodded grimly, and went back to work.

This won't work all the time. There are going to be nights when lollygagging it in the first half, then turning it on in the second, won't be enough. Last night was not one of those nights. The Celtics came out in the first half sluggish, especially on defense. "Their biorhythms are off," said radio announcer Sean Grande, and it sure looked like he was right. The Sixers, struggling all season and trying to welcome...

We're not the biggest Japanese-movie-monster buffs in the world, but we honestly can't remember an entry in the series when the monster got to go home early because Tokyo didn't even make a token effort to defend itself. But Ghidorah was sent to the bench early last night; the "Big Three" were no longer needed amid the Celtics' utter annihilation of the listless Knicks last night. It was a 23-point lead at halftime, and when...

As tempting as it would have been for the Bruins to come out swinging last night, playing back the Flyers for Patrice Bergeron's concussion, that's not how they roll. And they needed the two points even more than they needed the visceral satisfaction of seeing the Flyers laid out like the wounded soldiers in Gone With the Wind. The 6-3 shellacking wasn't exactly a tea party, though. Defenseman Andrew Alberts left the game after a...

No Christmas shopping today. No Thanksgiving shopping, either. Get your remote control warmed up and tell the family they're on their own for dinner, because there's a lot of sports to be watchin' today. The fun starts at 2:00, when the Revolution try to get from "happy to be in the championship game", which is old hat, to actually winning the thing. They're matched up against Houston for all the marbles again; goalie Matt Reis...

For the Super Bowl, this Bostonist is going with Da Bears, just because they're the ones who didn't knock us out of the game. And Bears coach Lovie Smith has a name custom-made for punny headlines. The -Ist-a-Verse, when not busy with other important issues, such as the sex life of the mayor (no, not Mayor Menino, SF mayor Newsom!) or that danged ATHF "meat wad," has been gearing up for the Super Bowl. Of...

Hockey players everywhere are thawing out in Dallas for the All-Star festivities, and several Bruins are making the most of it. While Bostonist was obsessing over the fancy new NHL uniforms, Iron Man Phil Kessel got the job done and scored three goals in the YoungStars game. The Bruins' Zdeno Chara won the hardest-shot competition as well, and he was a defenseman for the Eastern Conference in the All-Star game. That didn't work out as...