That's hardly my point. It's the TYPE of player I'm more concerned with. Tkahcuk isn't afraid to play dirty to win. The Bruins had no answer for his style of play. They could match up his talent (hell, the Bruins are much more talented than the Panthers in every way) but they let him just stand in front or behind the net for ages and never moved him. That's the major problem here.
Tkachuk really wasn’t even all that dirty.
For all of the pissing and moaning in the game threads—and, I mean, that’s fine, they’re game threads—it’s not like the Panthers really gooned things up or anything, especially not to Blues 2019 or Islanders 2021 levels. They were insanely
aggressive on the forecheck at times, but not even remotely overly
physical. Even Pasta’s struggles with physical play were more about his occasional and not particularly shocking playoff reversions to a newborn fawn on skates.
McAvoy murdering people with hits and Nosek coming up a little high on Staalface probably outweighed the physicality of the crosscheck and spear on Hathaway.
Team composition was awesome, IMHO. Easier to do when your top two centers are playing for nothing, so I don’t think we should be giving out awards for that or anything. But it’s looking more and more like the Bruins lost because the collective asses of their defense and coaching staff puckered up hard enough to spit coal into diamonds, leading to inexcusable numbers of horrible turnovers and the now traditional inexplicable goalie decision making that would be viewed as possible grounds for involuntary committal in any other context.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that most organizations that can afford to do so should have a small red team of lay advisors to which they can bring proposed major decisions to get the shit kicked out of them to avoid succumbing to foolish tradition, jargon, subject matter technocratic nonsense, and cant. Sure, maybe that’s because I’m thinking about my future employment prospects, but orgs from the CDC to the Bruins don’t merely miss the forest for the trees—they miss continents for the fleas.
