Anaheim, Calif. – The Anaheim Ducks got so far ahead in what turned out to be their 6-2 victory in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals on Wednesday night, captain Scott Niedermayer allowed himself to be presumptuous long before the final seconds were ticking off the clock.
The veteran defenseman, who had been part of three championship teams at New Jersey, started planning ahead for the postgame celebration – the first he would preside over wearing the captain’s “C.”
“You start to think about what it means, and what you’re going to do, and things like that,” Niedermayer said later.
In the third period, Niedermayer decided that he would pass the Stanley Cup first to his younger brother, Rob, whose presence on the Anaheim roster two years ago was one of the major reasons he signed with the Ducks as an unrestricted free agent.
So that’s what Scott Niedermayer did after the Ducks finished off the five-game rout of the Senators.
It went from Niedermayer to Niedermayer, then to defenseman Chris Pronger – the other assistant captain – and then to Teemu Selanne, the Finnish Flash who finally got to lift the Cup at age 36.
“You don’t really dream of passing it to your brother, I think,” said Scott Niedermayer, who also was named the Conn Smythe Trophy winner as the NHL playoffs’ MVP. “I never have. To be able to do that is definitely the highlight of my career.”
It’s all relative, of course, but this was too easy – about as easy as it can get short of a four-game sweep.
“It’s a strange situation when you’re playing a team you haven’t played all year and you don’t really know how it’s going to develop, how it’s going to play out,” Scott Niedermayer said. “We have a lot of guys in the room that were pretty hungry.
“When you play like Teemu has for 15 or 16 years, when you play 10, 12, 14 years and you haven’t had a chance to do this, that puts something in your stomach, I think, that you can count on at this time of year. And I think our guys showed that.”
The Ducks so dominated the Finals in becoming the NHL’s first West Coast NHL franchise to win professional sports’ most storied piece of hardware, it brought several realities into tighter focus.
It came about not simply because the Ducks are a masterfully assembled and talented team of complementary parts in the new NHL.
The Senators were awful for most of the series, with their top line all but missing in action, and that made an embarrassing faux pax in Game 5 – when Ottawa defenseman Chris Phillips put the puck off the skate of his own goalie, Ray Emery, and in for what turned out to be Anaheim’s game-winning goal – almost eerily appropriate. (Travis Moen got credit for it because he was the last Duck to touch the puck.)
But that also underscored something else: Two seasons into the post-lockout NHL, the Western Conference is head and shoulders better than the East.
That’s hard to get a grip on in a league in which the conferences at times might as well be in different hemispheres because of limited interconference play, but the West dominated what head-to- head play there was in the regular season … and then this.
Detroit and Vancouver put up far more of a fight in the Western Conference playoffs against the Ducks than did the Senators. And judging from this, the San Jose Sharks – second-round losers to the Red Wings – might have been watching this unfold and thinking that if they had managed to fight through the West, they would have been the first California Cup champion.
“We had some guys that didn’t play to what they were playing in the playoffs – and certainly in the latter part of the year,” Ottawa coach Bryan Murray said. “And I think that’s most disappointing. That’s what we and they have to live with through the summer. I say that in all due respect, because Anaheim is big and strong and real solid defensively, and made it difficult to play maybe to the level that we had seen earlier on.”
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
