Spector on final: Thomas’ reclamation project

VANCOUVER — We first met Tim Thomas in October of 2002, a 28-year-old National Hockey League rookie with a back story you could barely believe.

He was the goaltending version of Alex Burrows. Except that, where Burrows had been discovered in the East Coast League, Thomas was like a bad Ikea wall unit, having been returned to Scandinavia three separate times before being finally accepted by the Boston Bruins.

If ever there was a guy who needed to be interviewed that morning, it was this Thomas guy, whose first NHL camp was with the Oilers. Because chances were, the next conversation with him would require a trip to Providence or Helsinki.

It was a Saturday morning skate, just a few hours before his first NHL start in Edmonton, and the newest Bruin goalie regaled myself and Jim Matheson of the Edmonton Journal about the time he was treed by a bear while hunting north of Lynn Lake, Manitoba.

A location, in Thomas’ words, situated “at the end of the road, man.”

“I’ve got a knife in my teeth, and I’m pointing my bow and arrow down the side of the tree I HOPE the bear is coming up. He could be coming up the other side,” Thomas said that day. “I haven’t been that scared since I was five years old.”

He’d gone from a shot at a bruin to a shot with the Bruins, having stuck with the team after coming to camp on a free agent invite.

“I’ve never been here before,” he said that day. “This is what I’ve worked for my whole life.”

He told us the story of how his parents had pawned their wedding rings so Thomas could afford to travel with his Michigan club to a tournament in Ontario. One of the other Dads was Peter Karmanos, now owner of the Carolina Hurricanes. Thomas is from working class Flint.

“My parents never got their rings back, but my dad bought another ring for my mom on their 25th anniversary. They never told me about it until then,” he said. “I just thought my dad lost it fishing or something. That’s the kind of thing he’d do.”

Nine years later it is still all about rings and Bruins for Tim Thomas, the man who stands between the Vancouver Canucks and the Stanley Cup that seemed so certain only a few days ago.

He has stopped 141 of the 146 shots the highest scoring team in the NHL has fired at him in this Final. And, yes folks, he has wormed inside the heads of the Sedin twins, who spoke in stereo of the Canucks’ dilemma after Game 4, a 4-0 Boston shutout.

“We have to find a way to solve Thomas,” Daniel said.

“Thomas is making a lot of saves,” Henrik added.

So, Canucks fans, there may not be much satisfaction in what Tim Thomas has done to your lads in this Stanley Cup final. But you can take solace in the fact that, at least, the guy who’s knocking Henrik on his keester, who’s going all Billy Smith on Burrows, is basically the same reclamation project that Burrows is for your team.

Somehow, his hockey journey through the University of Vermont, Helsinki, Birmingham, Houston, Hamilton, Detroit, Solna, Sweden, Oulu, Finland and, of course, Boston, produced a goaltending style as diverse as the menu at an Indian BBQ pit.

“Anybody that knows the story of Tim Thomas, he’s taken a real bumpy road to get to the NHL,” said his coach Claude Julien. “He’s had so many obstacles in front of him that he’s overcome, it makes him a battler — the perfect goaltender for our organization because that’s what we are.

“He never quits on any puck, even to the point where he can let a bad goal in every once in a while, and you know that when the game is on the line he’s going to be standing on his head again. Because he battles through it.”

His is a personality that won’t stop fighting, just because he’s got a Vezina on the mantle.

He unloaded on Burrows in Game 4, wasting one on the pesky winger who’d been giving him the ol’ Ryan Smyth treatment, chopping the knob of Thomas’ goal stick.

“That was, like, the third time that he’d hit my butt end on that power-play,” Thomas said. “We were up 4-0, the game was getting down toward the end. So I thought I’d give him a little love tap and let him know, ‘I know what you’re doing, but I’m not going to let you do it forever.’”

At that point Elmer Fudd, bear hunter extraordinaire, turned into Paul Bunyan.

Yet who ever would have predicted that one day we’d see Thomas, defending his crease against Burrows in a league final. In the ECHL maybe, or the Finnish League.

But in a Stanley Cup final?

Like Thomas said: “This is what I’ve worked for my whole life.”