The Bruins' traditional post-Thanksgiving Day game, this year against the Red Wings, will launch NBC's national coverage of the NHL five weeks earlier than usual. (Damian Strohmeyer/Sports Illustrated)

On Nov. 29, 1991, the Bruins hosted the Canadiens in an afternoon game. It was the day after Thanksgiving and Boston defeated its fierce Montreal rivals 5-4 in overtime. Whether it was superstition, a strong fan response or smart marketing, the B’s repeated the post-Turkey Day match the following season, this time against the Hartford Whalers (again an OT victory for the home side) and this Friday afternoon game has been a fixture on Boston’s calendar ever since.

Now, 20 years later, the NHL and NBC are turning this tradition into a special event, one that is emblematic of an innovative new era for a league historically considered second-rate in the areas of marketing and promotion.
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Though it contains some glaring omissions, the "Boston Bruins Stanley Cup 2011 Champions" video is will please devoted fans with its account of the team's historic run to the title. (Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated)

The ice has melted, the scruffy beards are gone and now, in the radiating heat of mid-July — one month after the Bruins won the Stanley Cup — the official NHL highlights video gets its premier in Boston on Monday and in New York on Tuesday. It’s a good, not great video, unless you’re a Bruins fan in which case you will forgive its shortcomings — including omitting some of the B’s more rugged play — due to the happy ending and the inside look at your heroes. For Bruins fans everywhere, this will be a must-have addition to their hockey collection.
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Bruins stars Brad Marchand and Tim Thomas are two of the NHL season's biggest surprise success stories. (Shaun Best/Reuters)

The two most compelling figures of the Stanley Cup Final were the Bruins’ Tim Thomas, a 37-year-old goalie who had a spectacular season and postseason, and Brad Marchand,  a 23-year-old rookie who is still learning what the NHL is all about, but learning fast.
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Coach Claude Julien took lots of heat as he patiently guided his team on its long, hard road to the title. (Andy Clark/Reuters)

When the 2010-11 season was around a dozen weeks old, the Bruins went into a brief tailspin and some fans, bloggers and media types felt that coach Claude Julien was the wrong guy to run this team. Too defensive-oriented, they charged, Too predictable. Unwilling to shake up his team or mix up his lines…

Unfazed, Julien stuck with his plan and the Bruins finished atop the Northeast Division. When the playoffs began, the Boston media speculated that he’d have to win at least two rounds or he’d be gone, especially coming off the Bruins’ historic playoff collapse against Philadelphia the previous spring after having led the series 3-0. And when the B’s went down 2-0 to Montreal in the opening round, the gravediggers went reaching for their shovels.

This morning, Claude Julien is the coach of the Stanley Cup champions, something he greatly deserves. Which only goes to prove that what is said or written in the media and among fans has — or should have — little to zero impact upon what happens when the puck drops.

You often hear players and coaches in the playoffs talk about tuning out all outside distractions and focusing on their tasks. Julien had to do that all year. “As a coach you’re going to be subject to criticism, but the most important thing is what’s going on inside that dressing room,” he remarked from the postgame podium (video) after Game 7 against Vancouver, his five-year-old daughter sitting next to him, a Stanley Cup Champions t-shirt in his hand. “There wasn’t a guy that didn’t believe in what we were doing. So it’s easy to stay the course, and you got to stay the course. Today you’re rewarded for it.”
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A matter of mind: Keep an eye on goaltender Roberto Luongo and how he and the Canucks react if the Bruins score a goal, especially if they light the lamp early in the game. (Kathleen Hinkel/Icon SMI)

It’s Game 7 tonight, one last contest for the silver bowl named for Fredrick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston, the 16th Earl of Derby KG, GCB, GCVO, PC. Yes, that was his official title when, as Governor-General of Canada, he donated the trophy as a challenge cup for the country’s top amateur hockey team in 1882. The Stanley Cup is now the most famous and storied trophy competed for by professional athletes in North America. Players on both the Bruins and Canucks, regardless of their country of origin, have played their entire lives for a chance to have their name engraved on it.

That includes Tim Thomas, the Bruins goaltender from the hard-bitten industrial town of Flint, Michigan, who has distinguished himself above all others this spring. “When we’re in the garage or driveway playing as a kid and you’re fantasizing,” Thomas said on Tuesday, “well, I was Stevie Yzerman, which doesn’t make sense for a goalie, but you’re saying to yourself, Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, you’re not saying Game 6, you know? So this is really, you know, what every kid dreams about.”

Dreams are important and no one achieves greatness without them. But it will be transforming those dreams into desire and then execution that will likely carry the evening in Vancouver. The team that plays better and tries harder should be the one that skates with the Cup. Of course, as we’ve seen all spring, anything can happen in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and we fully expect one final bizarre chapter will be written in the story of this year’s very bizarre tournament.
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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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A key question: If the Bruins come out flying and quickly put Roberto Luongo under siege, how will the Canucks' goaltender react after being shelled in Boston's Game 3 blowout? (Greg M. Cooper/US Presswire)

Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final goes tonight in Boston in the wake of the NHL’s unprecedented decision to suspend Vancouver’s Aaron Rome for four games after his late hit on Nathan Horton.

For a contest that isn’t a seventh game, this may be the most highly anticipated Cup final match of the last couple of decades. There’s great curiosity about whether the patterns of play that emerged in Game 3 will carry over — can Boston again impose its style on Vancouver? — and how the teams will adjust with their necessary lineup changes. How will the B’s will fare without one of their top line forwards and who will the Canucks bring into the lineup on defense?

And, for many, the lure will be to see if and how the two antagonists further escalate their already fierce series.
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It's always hard to know how the NHL's supplementary discipline czars will react to incidents like Nathan Horton's season-ending concussion in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final. (Brian Snyder/Reuters photos)

We’re thinking about Nathan Horton this morning and hope the words we hear about his condition allay the fears caused by the sight of him staring blankly at the ceiling, arm extended upward, and eventually writhing at center ice during the first period of Game 3 in Boston.

After a morning hearing, Mike Murphy of the NHL will rule today on the hit by Canucks defenseman Aaron Rome that sent the Bruins winger to Massachusetts General Hospital. It certainly deserves a suspension. It was clearly a late hit, well after Horton passed the puck, and Rome was given an interference major and a game misconduct. That his hit resulted in a serious injury should be enough to keep Rome in street clothes for at least Game 4.

But — as we’ve seen repeatedly this season — you never know.

[UPDATE - Rome was given a four game suspension by the NHL. Yep, you never know.]
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Outgoing supplementary discipline czar Colin Campbell (left) can surely tell his successor, Brendan Shanahan, what it's like to make people angry no matter what decision you make. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

The single most-talked about play in Wednesday night’s Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final was not the great winning goal by Raffi Torres, nor any of the tremendous saves by Tim Thomas or Roberto Luongo, nor some of the big bodychecks thrown in the hotly contested game. No, it was the alleged chomp by Alex Burrows on Patrice Bergeron, which still has Burrows trending on Twitter throughout Canada, in Boston and some other hockey towns in the U.S. the following afternoon.

It is a biting commentary (sorry) on what the public considers most significant about the game. And that includes hockey fans and observers in the media, because when it comes to player conduct, penalties, suspensions, fines and all manner of supplemental discipline in the NHL, we’ve all become pretty obsessed with whether a particular act deserves a particular response and how strong that response should be.

The way discipline has gone in the postseason, it was not expected that Burrows would be suspended, and he wasn’t, even though that sort of nonsense often earns a player few games off during the regular season.

And that brings us to yesterday’s surprise news that Colin Campbell, who had a pretty rough year (see SI.com’s gallery), was stepping away from his task as the NHL’s chief disciplinarian and handing his wristslapper over to Brendan Shanahan beginning next season. The announcement was a surprise even to the league’s executives, who had decided on the change in March but had not planned to make it known until the Board of Governors’ meetings later this month. The NHL went public after Shanahan’s appointment had been leaked to TSN’s Darren Dreger earlier yesterday.
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Given Vancouver's firepower and Boston's suspect power play, Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas will likely have to be at his acrobatic best to win the Stanley Cup. (Anne-Marie Sorvin/US Presswire)

Sometime in the next two weeks, one of these teams will end a long Stanley Cup drought.  Each faced down a strong first-round challenge by a major rival and enters the final round  relatively healthy and with good depth. Both head coaches are Cup finals first-timers, they are former minor league teammates in the St. Louis Blues organization and each ran the bench for the Montreal Canadiens. But the similarities between the two foes are less striking than their differences.

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