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When Vancouver Canucks fans looked across the continent during the Stanley Cup conference finals in 2011, they knew one thing: the Tampa Bay Lightning would be the easier matchup for their heroes.
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The Lightning were a strong team, but they didn’t have an all-world goalie like Tim Thomas minding their crease, posting possibly the greatest season all-time for a goalie.
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And on Saturday evening at the tail end of the Hockey Night in Canada telecast, former Canucks defenceman Kevin Bieksa acknowledged he and his teammates knew it too.
“We wanted Tampa Bay,” he said during a panel discussion with Ron MacLean, Kelly Hrudey and Elliotte Friedman. “I’m probably the first person to ever admit this.”
“Just looking at the two different styles, we thought we matched up against Tampa better.”
The Eastern Conference final that year between the Boston Bruins and the Tampa Bay Lightning went to game seven that year, and Bieksa admitted he and his teammates watched it, obviously with great interest.
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But it wasn’t to be, with the Bruins winning the game.
And as many have pointed out — and which always must be mentioned — it was a game in which no penalties were called. The Lightning had scored three times on the power play in game six.
The Lightning’s special teams in those playoffs were outstanding: 25.4 per cent on the power play, 92.3 per cent on the penalty kill.
It was all very suspicious — especially given that the NHL’s head of discipline Colin Campbell had a son playing in the series for Boston. Campbell had recused himself from discpline matters on the series, but as former Province columnist Tony Gallagher noted, he still had authority over referee assignments in the playoffs, and those assignments were lucrative payouts.
Even if he wasn’t consciously biased in his assignments, or his interactions with those referees, he was inherently in a conflict of interest. And given how he was caught emailing former director of officiating Stephen Walkom about calls referees made involving not just the Bruins but also his son, it’s forever been hard to give him the benefit of the doubt around this.
He failed to understand conflict of interest before the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs; there was no reason to think he’d come to understand the concept any better by then.
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