I included the video from last season's Stanley Cup playoffs because I think it was a break out game for Former Gopher Phil Kessel. This season Kessel has taken it up a notch and has become a big time goal score for the Boston Bruins and scored a boat load of goals against the Bruins hated rival the Montreal Canadians. This year the Bruins marched past the Hab's and into the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 1998-1999. Here is a nice story about Phil Kessel that was posted up on NESN.
For Kessel, what a difference a year can make
James Murphy ----- April 27th 2009
While Phil Kessel has learned much tougher lessons off the ice - battling and beating testicular cancer during his rookie season in 2006-07 — he learned a valuable lesson about life in the NHL in his first playoff experience last spring. After notching an assist in Game 1 of the Bruins’ first-round series against the Canadiens, Kessel was benched for the next three games. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience for the winger, but he handled it professionally.
“Obviously, I was mad,” Kessel said recently. “It was a tough situation. But I moved on from it and learned from it.”
Kessel put the benching behind him with three goals in Games 5 and 6, helping the Bruins force Game 7 after trailing 3-1 in the series. For the Bruins, that series was a lesson they could compete with their archrivals, which Boston proved with a sweep of Montreal this postseason.
For Kessel, last year’s series was a lesson that hard work pays off in the NHL, and that effort is required no matter how much talent and skill a player possesses. The latter is something Bruins coach Claude Julien made a point to convey to his budding star.
“That’s the thing that Phil understood at one point, that if coaches are on you a little more than maybe some other players, maybe it’s because we think that you’re capable of giving us more than some of those players,” Julien said during the Bruins-Canadiens series. “That comes with the territory. You want to be an elite player. You have to give us a little more. And he’s really understood that extremely well.”
Kessel’s understanding and acceptance of Julien’s criticism and coaching methods translated into a breakthrough season in 2008-09. The 2006 first-round draft pick lit the lamp 36 times and had 60 points during the regular season. Kessel has followed that up with four goals and six points in the playoffs. Counting the regular season, he will enter the second round in the midst of an eight-game points streak with nine goals and 13 points during that span
I can remember when nearly the same thing happened to Vanek when he first came to Buffalo. That post-season, Lindy Ruff benched Vanek for specific games because of his "defensive deficiencies." Kessel supposedley had the same problems. I think this is simply a bi-product of Gopher hockey. For as we all know, they prefer to play an offensive brand and play defense secondarily (not that it's bad, but in the NHL it's always defense first). Once these two guys got their defense figured out, they both excelled. Vanek had 40 goals this season and Kessel had 36. One could also argue that they are the two best players to come out of the Gopher program in the past 10 seasons.
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