Tell me if this sounds familiar…

Congrats to Tim Thomas for showing some recognizable Vezina form last night. Okay so it’s been two months since I’ve written last. I took turns going around on other people’s blogs trying to get my point across there (which never actually goes well). Probably a big reason for not writing is that every other blogger out there has been doing a good job covering the issues. Or maybe there just haven’t been enough issues worth talking about…

If you told me at the end of last season that the B’s would have month-long spans without showing many sparks (beyond dominating at “Kesselmania,” what a joke that was), I would have slapped you across the face with a salmon like you had just tucked in your Bruins jersey. But now that this team has done everything in its power to muffle the momentum from last post-season, let’s take some time to reflect.
Everyone knew coming into the season that this team was good. This includes the players. How many times have you looked across the sports spectrum and seen a team whose downfall was it knew it was good? This has struck the Black and Gold harder than a slapper from Big Z and what we’ve been watching during this past stretch is the team trying to skate it off. Well, there are some times when you just need to head down the tunnel for 5 minutes and tape it.

Example: Maybe it’s just me having a man-crush on Tim “The Tank” Thomas (or hating people for thinking Rask is the second coming of Christ), but I think the biggest non-story for the B’s so far has been the battle for time between the pipes. Tuukka is a gifted goalie and could be headed for a hall of fame career, but look at Thomas’s personal stats outside of the first 5-10 games. There was a stretch of seven games before Timmy sat out with an injured blocker hand where his GAA was hovering around 1.7 and he could only go 50/50 in those games. Boston turned it around in a high-scoring game in Pittsburgh where Thomas may have had the most underrated performance of the year (next to the 2008-2009 All-Star game, but they can’t give the MVP to a Bruin in front of a Montreal crowd). That conference match-up saw Timmy stop not only a breakaway from both Crosby and Malkin, but also a 2-on-1 from – you guessed it – both Crosby and Malkin.

So why were the B’s 7th in the East going into last night? Besides a lackluster offensive effort, the defense has taken a beating. When your defense is taking a beating (or anyone for that matter), they look for nights where they only have to provide 100% effort rather than stretch for the extra 10%. Those nights, unfortunately for TT, have been with last year’s Vezina in net. Welcome to a team that knows they’re good. Welcome to a team that knew they had a top goalie with a top performance in net last night and waited for the 3rd period to stop Ottowa from shooting and put a couple in the net themselves.

Hopefully, last night’s performance was just a big F you from Thomas to the rest of the team. Hopefully, the attitude of ‘your most important player played a 60-minute game, maybe you can play more than 20-minutes’ will rub off on the rest of the team going into the pre-winter classic stretch. If the same team that’s been playing for the past few months shows up New Years Day, the game at Fenway may do more to harm their popularity than promote it.

Either way, I’ll see you at the ball park!