Refs seem to have rediscovered the idea that sending a player to the box and leaving his team in a potentially costly penalty-kill is one of the best ways to curb on-ice mayhem. (Mark Goldman/Icon SMI)

Perhaps Wednesday will go down as the day the NHL regained some control over the Stanley Cup playoffs and did it in the most logical manner – having the referees call penalties rather than “let the boys play.”

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Roberto Luongo's lousy play has Canucks fans and media calling for him to take a seat on the pine. (Kathleen Hinkel/Icon SMI)

It’s a difficult task to repeat as a champion in the NHL. No Stanley Cup winner has done it since the Red Wings in 1997 and 1998. But it’s also tough just to reach the Cup final in consecutive years. Only five clubs have managed that since 1988 which, if my math is correct — always a tricky proposition — means that almost 90 percent of the time, teams don’t get a return trip to the fourth round.

The way Canucks are playing right now, they look like they’ll be hanging with that 90 percent.

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Montreal Canadiens defenseman Josh Gorges is leading the NHL in blocked shots (150), but which player has had the most shots blocked so far this season? (Photo by Richard Wolowicz/NHLI via Getty Images)

By its nature, hockey is not a game that is easily reducible to numbers. An entire industry has sprung up around baseball statistics, but stats can occasionally take some of the fun out of any game by reducing it to a dry abstraction.  Stats not only have their downside on the entertainment front, they can mislead about a player’s real value.

For example, defensive defensemen and checking forwards often don’t get the credit they deserve because they don’t post gaudy point totals, and some people still find plus-minus to be more of a team stat than a reflection of an individual player’s abilities. And sometimes numbers lie.

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Who are those men in blue? Defenseman Keith Ballard is one of the few recognizable names that has been appearing in preseason games for the Canucks this year. (Anne-Marie Sorvin-US PRESSWIRE)

With repeat runs to championship series or games in team sports increasingly unlikely these days, the Vancouver Canucks are trying to increase their chances by managing their roster a bit differently. It’s a long, long year for any NHL club, and even longer for a team that goes deep in the playoffs, so the Canucks know they’re going to need all sorts of luck, breaks, good health and other intangibles aside from consistently superior performances.

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In a series full of enigmas, the biggest has been Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo, who unwisely gave the Bruins plenty of emotional ammo before Game 6 and then inexplicably turned into a sieve. (Reuters)

So we’ll go to a seventh game in the Stanley Cup Final after Boston beat Vancouver 5-2 on Monday, and the only thing one can say for certain is that the last game of the season will be on Wednesday.

There’s no way to fully understand what has gone on in this series, one in which the home team always scores first and wins, the Canucks look like deserving champs at home and big-time chumps on the road, the Bruins sometimes throw the puck away like yesterday’s trash, sometimes more concerned with physical provocation (to which the Canucks don’t respond on the road) and seemingly more intent on hitting to injure than hitting to separate an opponent from the puck.

We want the Stanley Cup Final to be the best hockey of the year. This isn’t. It has been great theater, but the quality of play hasn’t equaled the drama. Neither of these teams nor their fans care, of course. They don’t award the Stanley Cup based on style points.
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Win or lose, Bruins goalie Tim Thomas is the likely Conn Smythe winner. (Michael Ivins/US Presswire)

With the Canucks back in Boston — site of their horror show Games 3 and 4 — and the Stanley Cup in the building, the Bruins will, as their coach Claude Julien says, hope “to create a Game 7.”

The B’s will have to be better than they were on Friday in Vancouver, when the Canucks showed the physical dimension that was missing from their play during the two previous games. The Canucks took every opportunity to smash Boston players, outhitting them 47-27, forcing numerous turnovers (NHL stats had the takeaways at 15-6 in the Canucks’ favor), tightening their defensive play while getting a very strong game from Roberto Luongo, and doing all sorts of things that seemed unimaginable after Vancouver’s two-game massacre in Boston. After Game 4, we wrote that Vancouver would need a massive turnaround to halt Boston’s huge grab of the series’ momentum and we felt somewhat skeptical that they could. But that’s just what they did.
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As the stakes, tension and desperation rise, the feisty, physical play of Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas could ignite more nastiness in a Cup final that has been blemished by it. (Greg M. Cooper/US Presswire)

This dramatic, nasty and sometimes ugly Stanley Cup Final resumes tonight in Vancouver and the stakes are obvious for both the Canucks and Bruins. If the home team loses, it faces the prospect of traveling back to Boston with the B’s having a chance to win the Stanley Cup on home ice, where they crushed the Canucks in two straight games. If the visitors lose, it will halt their mighty momentum and put the Canucks on the verge of the championship.

We ventured a few thoughts on how the series has progressed over the first four games yesterday (If you missed that, here’s the link so you can catch up.) and while the series is tied 2-2, it feels more like a 2-0 lead for the Bruins, who sail into Vancouver with the wind at their backs. Whether the Canucks can dig deep and raise the level of their play to match and overcome what the B’s threw at them in Games 3 and 4 is the overriding question for everything that will happen tonight.
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Among the Canucks' many headaches: Kevin Bieksa (3) and other key members of their defense corps look gassed or are injured and must find a way to halt Boston's momentum. (Brian Jenkins/Icon SMI)

Alain Vigneault said all the right — and predictable — things at the podium after his team lost Game 4 to the Bruins, 4-0, on Wednesday night to even the Stanley Cup final at two games apiece. Asked about his team’s confidence, he responded, “It’s real good. You know, if somebody would have told me at the beginning of the year that we could play for the Stanley Cup, best two-out-of-three series with home ice advantage in front of our fans, I would have taken those odds, I would have taken that anytime to play for the big prize.”

But what if that someone had also told him that his Canucks had just been outscored 12-1 in the last two games, the biggest two-game margin in Cup finals history, that his best players weren’t playing like his best players, that his defense corps had wilted, that his power play had gone south, that his goaltender had stopped making the big saves,  and that his team was being physically dominated and worn down? How much confidence could that inspire?
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The Bruins won't last long if goalie Tim Thomas has to keep bailing them out. (Kathleen Hinkel/Icon SMI)

The Stanley Cup Final moves to Boston tonight for Game 3 and the Bruins must win, as NBC/SI analyst Pierre McGuire explains in this SI.com video. In fact, the Bruins pretty much have to take the next two games at home or the series will return to Vancouver with the Canucks having a chance to win the Cup on home ice in Game 5. But the B’s can’t think about two wins just yet. “One at a time” has to be their mantra.

The Bruins have been accentuating the positive despite their 2-0 deficit. They speak about their resiliency, the fact that they’ve rallied from being down two before, and how they were in both games right up to the very end. All that is true, and with a few bounces, we could be at 1-1 or even 2-0 the other way. But Vancouver has been the better, more consistent team so far and had it not been for Tim Thomas, these games might not have been so close.
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Mark Recchi has been a major part of the Bruins' power play struggles. (Brian Babineau/Getty Images)

Like Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, in which four people describe a crime in four very different ways, Game 1 of the Canucks-Bruins Stanley Cup Final evoked very different reactions. Some found it boring, lacking flow and intensity and overmanaged by the referees who called too many penalties. Others found it a rousing opener that provided one late game-winning goal, a number of big hits, spectacular saves, a few angry scrums and something for the world to nibble on as we head for Game 2.
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