Why everyone—yes, everyone—outside of Boston is rooting against the Bruins in this year's Stanley Cup Finals. And why the city deserves nothing less

The crowd at TD Garden had spent the night in a state of frothy delirium, singing, chanting, double-fisting. Down 2-0 in the series, their Bruins had potted 12 goals in the ensuing two games. Two bloody massacres, filling Boston with the kind of braggadocio it'd been missing for a solid 10 minutes. Back from the brink of elimination and now just two games short of their goal, Bruins fans had a new battle cry:

"WE WANT THE CUP!"

Of course you want the Cup. Everyone wants the Cup.

They want it in Buffalo, where snake-bitten fans have seen their dreams crushed for decades. They want it in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where two different franchises have struggled in vain to get close. They want it in Winnipeg, 15 years after the Jets left town, months before a new, nameless team takes the ice.

If any of those teams win Lord Stanley's grail, that would be fine with the hockey world. Those cities have seen enormous sports heartbreak, their spirits deflated as they trudge through January blizzards waiting for their shot at the big one. If a parade runs through Chippewa Street next summer, mazel tov. They'll deserve it.

But you, Bruins fans? No one wants you to have it.

Oh sure, there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to jump on the Bruins bandwagon. This is an anonymous, lunch pail-carrying team. Only one Bruin cracked 30 goals this season, and he's a gritty two-way player from Vancouver who goes by Looch. One of their best players is a 21-year NHL veteran, also from B.C., still going strong at 43. Boston's goalie was a 217th overall draft pick, toiled for years in the minors and in Europe, didn't become a starter until age 31, and six years later might be the best netminder on the planet.

This series should have reinforced pro-Bruins sentiment. Vancouver's Alex Burrows biting Patrice Bergeron's fingers was a punk move, one that would have been handled with a flurry of right hooks to the head if this were 30 years ago and the game hadn't turned away from fighting. Maxim Lapierre's Game 2 taunt, where he stuck his fingers in Bergeron's face and dared him to bite back, wasn't much better.

And there's The Hit. Five minutes into Game 3, Aaron Rome lined up Nathan Horton, watched him get rid of the puck, took three strides, dipped his shoulder, leapt for the head, and blew him up. However you felt about the hit, you had to feel for Horton, laid out on the ice, his teammates and 17,565 spectators looking on in horror, medics fumbling with a stretcher, trying to stabilize the big Ontarian before the frantic ride to Mass General.

The Bruins responded with eight goals in the final two periods. After the game, they placed The Jacket—an old Bruins warmup awarded to a player who made a special contribution to that night's victory—in Horton's locker. The last player to receive The Jacket was also Horton, after his game-winning goal in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. This was Win One for the Gipper stuff, the 1970 Willis Reed-inspired Knicks crossed with the '93 Islanders rallying after Dale Hunter cheapshotted Pierre Turgeon's shoulder into oblivion.

And you know what? We're still not rooting for you.

No one in Canada wants you to win, of course. Not when a Canadian team might bring the Cup back home for the first time in 18 years.

But U.S. hockey fans aren't behind you either. There's none of that (slightly weird) national pride here. Flyers fans hate Boston. Rangers fans hate Boston. Casual hockey fans in Boise or Mobile are, at best, indifferent about Boston.

You know what everyone really hates? When Boston fans complain about The Drought. The Bruins haven't won a Stanley Cup since 1972. Old-timers get weepy for Orr and Esposito and Bucyk, wish for one more Cup before they die.

Sure, Boston was once a suffering sports town. Injuries derailed Larry Bird's career, and Lenny Bias' tragic death sent the Celtics into mediocrity for nearly two decades. The mismanaged Red Sox ran out a series of bloated, overpaid veterans, only to see the rest of the division—Toronto, Baltimore, and the hated Yankees—stomp all over them. Curse or not, 86 years without a title would wound any sports fan. The Patriots? They just sucked. So yeah, those were tough times for Boston sports fans.

Now? You sound like the douchebag who bitches that, after the three-bedroom in Tribeca, the place in the Hamptons, the kids' boarding school, the annual trips to Paris and Aruba, the four cars, and two alimonies, you've barely got enough left for that third bottle of Dom at Per Se.

The vast, vast, vast majority of Bruins fans are also Sox fans, C's fans, and Pats fans. The Celtics won the city's most recent title, in 2008. If the Bruins win the Cup this year, the Boston pro sports team with the longest championship drought will be the Patriots, who won the Super Bowl in...2004.

Meanwhile, the Canucks have existed for 41 years and haven't won jack. Vancouver had an NBA team once. They were run into the ground by an incompetent stooge, then shipped off to Memphis.

We hope Nathan Horton makes a full recovery. We feel for the 12 Bruins fans who've shunned the city's other franchises and waited nearly 40 years for their shot.

The rest of you? Prepare yourselves for heartbreak. Until the day after Vancouver wins the Cup, when you can watch your first-place Red Sox try to break Boston's Three-Year Curse.

Jonah Keri is a writer. He's a good writer. He's become a very big name in the past few months, thanks to his book, "The Extra 2%," which breaks down the Tampa Bay Rays' financial miracle of the past few years. Keri has accomplished a lot and deserves a good amount of respect.
But even the best can be wrong.

That's precisely what Keri is in his GQ article, titled "The Boston Bruins Vs. The World." The subhead reads "Why everyone -- yes, everyone -- outside of Boston is rooting against the Bruins in this year's Stanley Cup Finals. And why the city deserves nothing less."

Keri makes this assessment based on the fact that Boston sports fans are spoiled. With the Patriots winning three Super Bowls, the Red Sox twice winning the World Series this decade and the Celtics joining the party in 2008, Bostonians have been to more championship parades in a decade than many sports fans experience in a lifetime.

Where he's wrong: "The vast, vast, vast majority of Bruins fans are also Sox fans, C's fans, and Pats fans. ... We feel for the 12 Bruins fans who've shunned the city's other franchises and waited nearly 40 years for their shot."

Sure, there are some folks who love all their teams equally, but there's just no match in this city than a Bruins diehard. Men and women permanently etch Black and Gold tattoos onto their bodies all across New England. They could care less about basketball and baseball, calling both sports boring and full of soft players that wouldn't last 3 seconds on the ice. They hold Bobby Orr to a higher regard than any other human being (and some deities) to ever walk the planet. They've spent, in some cases, their entire lives rooting for a team that's never won.

That team is now two wins away from hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup, an event that would fulfill the sports lives of millions of fans who never thought they'd see it happen.

Keri also gets downright rude.

"You sound like the douchebag who [complains] that, after the three-bedroom in Tribeca, the place in the Hamptons, the kids' boarding school, the annual trips to Paris and Aruba, the four cars, and two alimonies, you've barely got enough left for that third bottle of Dom at Per Se," he wrote.

Nobody's going to say that Bruins fans are always the most civil or reasonable folks, but hoity-toity rich folks from the Hamptons? You couldn't be any further off.

Keri also assumes quite a bit regarding fans from both the U.S. and Canada. He shares the laundry list of strikes against the Canucks from the first three games of the series alone -- the bite, the taunt, "The Hit" -- but says that despite all that, everyone hates the Bruins.

"And you know what? We're still not rooting for you," he wrote. "No one in Canada wants you to win, of course. Not when a Canadian team might bring the Cup back home for the first time in 18 years. But U.S. hockey fans aren't behind you either. There's none of that (slightly weird) national pride here. Flyers fans hate Boston. Rangers fans hate Boston. Casual hockey fans in Boise or Mobile are, at best, indifferent about Boston."

Some of that may, in part, be true. But it's not universal. I've personally had a talk with a Toronto radio host who couldn't have been any clearer in his alliance with the Bruins this week (he honestly might be pulling for Boston more than anyone in this city). He said that given the aforementioned actions by the Canucks, they've become impossible to root for. He made it clear that I need to spread the message that Boston -- an Original Six team full of the hard-working, anonymous players described by Keri himself -- has become Canada's team. He doesn't speak for everyone, but he's not alone.

And certainly, Mobile, Ala., has nothing to do with the Stanley Cup Final.
Most folks outside of British Columbia found Aaron Rome's hit on Nathan Horton to be a gruesome, violent, intentional hit that targeted the Bruins' best goal scorer. It was a cheap shot, and the NHL's ruling to suspend Rome for the rest of the series proved that.

Quite simply, the Canucks aren't winning many fans -- not in Canada, and not
anywhere else. Raffi Torres is playing like, well, Raffi Torres, avoiding punishment for his flying elbow in Game 3 solely because he failed to make contact with his intended target -- Johnny Boychuk's face. Henrik Sedin, the team's captain and leader, authored a flop that would make an Italian soccer fan laugh.

Alex Burrows bit a man.

People do not like this stuff.

Nobody roots for the man who bites another man. That doesn't happen.
But still, Keri says that it's just impossible for folks to root for Boston. It's based on ... well, it's based on nothing. Maybe it was meant to get a rise out of Boston, and if that was the goal, then bravo. But if it was meant to prove anything, it only assured us that Keri has some work to do if he wishes to continue his newfound career path in sociology.

Keri's hometown, by the way?

That would be Montreal.