It’s not often that you have a November meeting with the Florida Panthers circled on your calendar. And by not often, I mean you’ve never ever had an urge to circle a meeting with the Panthers on your calendar. Not even during the heyday of rats and cool jerseys featuring palm trees and hockey sticks.
After all, those games didn’t necessarily come with the return of a B’s legend to Garden ice. But tonight does as goaltender Tim Thomas, a Bruin from 2002 to 2012 and now skating with the Panthers after a year off from an NHL rink, is in the building. He won’t play (he’s still nursing a groin injury), but he’s in the building for the first time since April 27, 2012. And that’s big news.
Few players were as polarizing as Thomas throughout his tenure as a Bruin.
For every Thomas supporter, there was another fan or pundit that claimed that the club would never be successful with his wild-styled ways carrying the bulk of the B’s load in the crease. Even during his best, namely his run from late 2010 to 2012, Thomas couldn’t keep the criticisms at bay.
But this time around, they were for reasons other than his in-game style of play.
By now, you know the story-- Thomas skipped out on the club’s trip to the White House due to political differences, he took a year off, and ultimately left Boston on a sour note, his contract traded to the New York Islanders for nothin’ but cap relief. It wasn’t the way fans in the Hub wanted to remember Thomas’ final days as a Bruin, but that’s how it all (unfortunately) ended.
So, just how will that go over with an expected sellout crowd in Boston?
“I really don’t know how the fans are going to treat him. And I’m really not going to spend too much time thinking about that either. As I said, I’ve got a lot more important things to think about right now,… B’s coach Claude Julien said this morning when asked of the crowd’s reaction to Thomas’ return to the building that was home for a decade. “We can write something about every time a team comes in here because there’s probably a chance that a player from this organization has been traded at some point. We kind of look past that and don’t put too much emphasis on it.
“Tim Thomas doesn’t win the Stanley Cup if our team doesn’t play as well as they did in front of him. So this is an honest statement: Tim played well but I think our team played just as well in front of him. You don’t win a Stanley Cup with just a goaltender. He won the Conn Smythe because he was very good but at the same time, I would like to hope the statistic of your goaltenders can also reflect the team in front of you,… Julien added. “We did a pretty good job in front of him for years minimizing the goal scoring chances and the quality of it. So let’s make sure we don’t take away credit from the rest of the team too. He was a big part of it and so was a lot of other guys, but at the same time, I think we won the Stanley Cup because we were a good team. That’s what I like to think anyways.…
It’s not wrong, but it’s also quite a knock to the superhuman play of Thomas, no?
While I’ve made my point about this situation a thousand times, let me say it again: If you’re going to tonight’s Bruin game and booing Tim Thomas after the (expected) video montage acknowledging his time here, you’re a meathead that’s focusing on one single event over the entire big picture of Thomas’ career in town.
For me, Thomas’ career ended with a signature Tim moment. Just moments after a loss that sent the Black-and-Gold home for the summer, Thomas skated over, and mouthed a smile to a crying fan in the stands. The fan, as it turned out, was one of his three daughters. As the season became the offseason, Thomas decided that life with his family was more important than yet another year of the grind that comes with being a starting goaltender in the NHL and opted to take some time off (and leave a whole bunch of money on the table) for moments you couldn’t put a price on.
How could I, or anybody for that matter, ever hold something like that against him?
At the end of the day, I’ll always have an immense amount of respect for No. 30 for understanding that at the end of the day, this is just a game (a very awesome one at that), and that it’s better to have your family than have a career that inevitably ends whether you want it to or not.
Of course, if you paid money to get into the building, you’re more than allowed to exercise your right to boo a guy that didn’t want to end up as a 50-year-old ex-NHLer with no family, but I don’t think that you’re thinking straight. Or if you boo because he didn’t make a team trip to the White House, that’s cool, but you’re conveniently appearing to ignore his 196 wins as a Bruin (fourth most all time), two Vezina trophies, and of course, the newest gold banner hanging from the rafters.
But down on ice level, tonight’s game against the Panthers present the B’s with their perfect chance to simply snap out of their recent funk (they enter tonight’s game with just one win in their last five outings), and that’s something that begins with current Boston netminder, Tuukka Rask.
Despite taking the shootout loss on Tuesday in spite of a 34-save performance, the 26-year-old Rask takes to the ice tonight with eight wins, an 0.98 goals against average, and downright disgusting .968 save percentage in nine career games against the ‘Cats.
He’ll be opposed to veteran and former Boston College standout Scott Clemmensen, who skates into tonight’s game with an .889 save percentage in 76 minutes of play this year.
For the roster in front of Rask, it’s about getting back to the basics.
“I’m just looking for our identity basically. We’re not playing the way we should and we know that. We all know it. We know that we’re certainly not making good decisions out there, we’re not getting the results we want. You have to work through it and find your game,… a frustrated Julien noted. “When you get tired of losing, you do something about it. So it’s one of those situations where we keep working hard at trying to rectify our game and it’s an opportunity here tonight to go out and show that we have made some progress.…
Boston has won the only previous meeting between the two this year, a 3-2 victory in Sunrise, Fla.