For years, Joe Thornton lived a charmed life. He's a giant, handsome guy, married to a beautiful woman, paid greatly for his ability as a peerless puck possession and passing purist. His team was generally successful enough to have his team in the playoffs, and more often than not winning at least one round or two.
However, all of those years they never won a third round, never won the Western Conference, and often flamed out to worse teams than them, often in bizarre, depressing circumstances. Joe Thornton, the man drafted #1 overall by Boston, and then shipped out of Boston to a team he would win the Hart Trophy (MVP) for, was the face of playoff disasters, the face of the team, the organization, and truthfully, the player who folded in the playoffs.
Somewhere around the time the team missed the playoffs for the first time in his San Jose run, and where we sit today with the Sharks again one game away from the Western Conference Finals, the hockey world has collectively decided to love Thornton for the guy he is in that first paragraph and forget about all the ills spelled out in the second. Joe Thornton, having one of his best seasons at age 35, has had his public perception completely swing around. He is now truly living a charmed life, the guy everyone wants to see lift that Cup.
This isn't an idea native to hockey, the one of the aging star suddenly being the apple of everyone's eye, but it seems to be more present in hockey than others. Joe Thornton is the latest in the longest line of players who moved from playoff failure to lovable loser in the eyes of the public. The most famous example is Ray Borque, long the face of playoff failures in Boston, traded as a mercenary to a loaded team in Colorado, but that's the lesser example, where Borque was handed the title (literally so, with Sakic, a Hall of Fame star in his own right, quickly passing it to Borque when they won). Thornton is still leading that team, and doing so with finally the appreciation of the public he deserves.
In some ways, this happened very recently, with one old (pun intended) Peyton Manning, a legendary player known for his playoff failures, but was during that last run people started pulling for him. I heard so many previous Manning haters saying they wanted to see Manning win his second. Here it is Thornton and his first. Age allows people to look past the failures, the perceived lack of abilities and clutch, and let people focus on what they witnessed - an incredible, long, Hall-of-Fame to be career.
Joe Thornton is that guy this time. Everyone wants to see him win, and in that way he is again the face of the Sharks, as some of that goes for the whole group. No team has suffered the odd sports fate for being so good to consistently disappoint than the Sharks have. Starting with their run to the 2003-04 Western Conference Finals - the year Marleau broke out - the Sharks made the playoffs 10 straight times. This is year 12 of that era, and they finally have a really good chance to do it. It isn't only Thornton, but Marleau, the guy who was first stripped of his captaincy in Year 7 of the run, or Pavelski and Couture, who have been there since Year 5, or even Brent Burns. The Sharks are full of those stories, Thornton just happens to be the best one.
The Sharks may not win, in fact their shock loss to Nashville in Game 6 puts them in a situation where it is more likely they add another horrible playoff loss to their personal pyre than win 9 more games and lift the Cup. But still, the lasting memory of the collective hockey world getting behind this tragic figure should be remembered. Especially since Thornton's not done. He may have a few years left as seen by this past season, but the shift is here to stay.
Even if they lose in Game 7, even if they don't but lose in the next round or the next, the people that appreciated him won't stop. Joe Thornton is one of the great players of his generation. He is the best pure passer to come into the league since 2000. He is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, and in his aging years, people are finally looking past his team's issues in the playoffs to realize that he was that guy all along.
