Hmmm...my opponent seems to have started off with some fairly wild claims. So be it. The series as I see it:
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Intangibles:
The Bruins enjoy both home ice and rest in this series. Boston had a 1st round bye and cruised through the 2nd round in 5 games. Minnesota has played two rounds thus far, and is coming off a seven game war that went into triple overtime in game 7. Nalyd wants his team to play a physical game on the road, but how much energy will they have, especially in games 1 and 2 in Boston?
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Coaching:
Obvious and large advantage to Boston. Arbour vs. Quinn tactically is about as big a mismatch as you're likely to see in the ATD. With home ice to his advantage, Arbour will be able to largely dictate the matchups against the overmatched Quinn.
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Goaltending:
Another obvious area in which Boston is superior. I have a lot of respect for Holmes. He has a good big game record, and I think that the upper end of how good he might have been is in Grant Fuhr territory. But with Fuhr we have a known commodity, and with Holmes we have a lot of maybes. Unless you assume Holmes' absolute top end to be his actual skill level and you never actually saw Grant Fuhr play, goaltending is clearly an area of strength for Boston in this series.
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Clearly, the Bruins have a lot going for them before we even begin to discuss the skaters. So what do we make of the matchup of the skaters? Minnesota is not going to win by playing a skill game; Nalyd seems to understand that implicitly and has thus chosen to focus on what he perceives to be a physicality advantage, with a little hyperbole (c'mon..."corrupting home ice"?!) thrown in for good measure. We'll talk about the teams from a skill perspective later, but physicality should be addressed first and foremost.
Just how physical are the Fighting Saints? Considerably less so than Nalyd has made them out to be. The top line of Bentley - Thornton - Jagr has no teeth to it, whatsoever, and the second line depends entirely on Bob Gainey for it's physicality. Mickey MacKay, although a great player, was known as "The Wee Scot" for a reason (he was tiny), and Jack Darragh (although a great skater) was of average size with no reputation for physicality or two-way play. Pelletier actually calls Darragh "one of the cleanest players of his era"
here. Nalyd's claim that Darragh's fore and backchecking are important to his strategy is interesting considering that Darragh isn't special in either area of the game. One has to wonder about a strategy that depends on a guy like Darragh for the dirty work. On the scoring lines, which will eat up the lion's share of the icetime at forward for the Fighting Saints (if Nalyd has any sense...though he's welcome to give his bottom lines more TOI if he likes), only Bob Gainey brings any kind of physical aggression. Among the other five players, Bentley and MacKay are probably the two smallest skaters in the series, Darragh was a softie, Thornton is incapable of playing with an edge and Jagr is mostly good for a cheap roughing penalty now and again.
Boston's scoringlines are actually much bigger and stronger, with only Vladimir Martinec even remotely vulnerable to the physical game, and
he had a reputation for being able to take a lot of physical punishment. As Pelletier says:
Few players were treated more brutally than Martinec. This small (5'9" and 178 Ibs) right wing somehow always seemed to bounce back totally undisturbed and more often than not with a smile on his face. His constant smile was a sort of a trademark and frustrated his opponents even more. A lot of reporters used to ask him why he always was smiling, even after a vicious crosscheck in the back. He said that he did it because he enjoyed the game so much and always had fun.
Doesn't sound like a guy who is easily bullied to me. Cook and Leclair speak for themselves. It should also be noted that Alex Delvecchio was a big man for the O6 era (about 6'0" 200 lbs.) and missed approximately 2.37 games in his very long career. Nighbor was average in size, but again is a player who stayed quite healthy for a long time - and this in the most brutal era in hockey history. Peter Stastny's strength and chippiness are clear enough to anyone who saw him play. The guy took a lot of abuse as the first eastern block player to come to the NHL, and never backed down from any of it or let it affect his play. Exactly who among Boston's scoring forwards does Nalyd think he can intimidate?
On the bottom lines, things look better for the Fightins, with McGee, Sloan and Crawford bringing solid physical games, but these are not over-the-top dominant physical players, by any means, nor do they hold a notable advantage over their bottom line physical counterparts on the Bruins: Parise, Pappin and Sandford.
All-in-all, the Bruins actually have the tougher group of forwards, especially on the scoringlines.
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So where does that leave us...comparing bluelines, I guess. The Fighting Saints have two notable bullies on their blueline in Stevens and Hall, which is interesting because so do the Bruins in Harvey and Dutton. Both Hall and Dutton are also the team's designated enforcers and both are quite accomplished pugilists. Red Dutton is pretty clearly the better hockey player, but in terms of physicality and fighting ability, they are about equal. This is an important departure from last series for Minnesota, when they faced a team whose toughest fighter was Adam Graves. Boston has a sheriff, and quite a good one, at that.
Stevens has a fearsome reputation, but then again, so does Doug Harvey. Harvey's nastiness is a little less well-known to modern fans, partially because he was sneaky and drew few penalties, but Doug was a brutal hockey player who was willing to resort to quite dirty tactics to get his point across - his most famous targets being Gordie Howe's ribs and Red Sullivan's spleen (which nearly killed Sullivan, who was given last rites while laying on the ice). As much of a hitter as Stevens is, no one has been given last rites because of anything he's done on the ice. Initiating physicality against Harvey is extremely dangerous coming from a team that will send guys like MacKay and Bentley regularly into the zone against him. But that is Nalyd's prerogative if he wants to play that game.
Beyond that, both bluelines feature a couple of secondary physical players in Stuart/Foote and Day/Neilson. Hod Stuart was quite a big man, and was known as a tough hitter, but he was also a clean player - quite a bit like Jim Neilson, actually. Like Stuart, Neilson was huge for his era (6'2" 205 lbs was a giant in the O6 era), and quite capable of taking the body, though he didn't really play to hurt his opponents. Give Stuart a slight edge in physicality here, but really it's pretty close. Foote and Day is an interesting comparison. Both guys were rather notorious for playing clutch and grab hockey, and both were very good at getting away with it. Foote could be a bit dirty, but he was never a huge hitter, while Day was one of the best hitters of the Eddie Shore era, which is saying something. Pelletier says about Day:
Day was a strong and fearless player...
Defensively he was a genius. He was a masterful stick checker and positional player, and, along with the New York Rangers Ching Johnson, was the league's top body checker. Day was very well respected around the league, even though he employed a clutch and grab style of hockey he would later popularize as a coach, becoming a league power by using the rule-bending tactic.
Although I respect Adam Foote's toughness, I don't think anyone in their right mind would compare him to Ching Johnson with a straight face. The two are similar, but Day clearly wins the comparison here. Overall, The bluelines actually look quite even from a physical perspective. Nalyd is probably counting on a modern bias in favor of Stevens and Foote for his perceived advantage here, because the truth of the matter is that there is very little to seperate the defenses physically.
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Exactly where is the physical advantage Nalyd is trying to push in this series? It's not at all clear to me which is the more physical team in this matchup. With Kurtenbach on the bench, the level of aggression is nearly identical between the two teams, and the Bruins have a clear size/strength/toughness advantage among the top-6 forwards. As is typical of my teams, these Bruins aren't designed to play caveman hockey, but they can certainly withstand it, and are among the healthiest teams in the league. If Nalyd wants to win this series by "hurting" the Bruins, he's hanging onto a very thin reed.
