There’s losing, and there’s losing. Which makes the assumption of many that the Vancouver Canucks will get right back to winning once next season begins, at least the kind of winning they did this year before they ran into the brick wall known as the Boston Bruins, speculative at best.

You didn’t hear anybody inside or outside of the Miami Heat organization dare suggest that basketball squad just needed to continue on ahead as is following their stunning loss to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA final last weekend.

No one’s saying they have to move LeBron James, or even one of his two running mates.

But that was no ordinary loss. That was not a heroic defeat, and so pretty much everyone figures something substantive will have to be done to alter that team’s critical flaw. Or flaws.

Well, the Canucks would fall under the same category, and the conversation will begin with Roberto Luongo.

More, really, should be about the Bruins now, the winners, rather than the losers. But that which followed the game made Vancouver the central story, and the combination of Luongo’s words and actions made him the central figure in the demise of the Canucks, a hockey club seemingly poised to bring the Cup back to Canada.

Over the course of the past 12 months, Luongo has now been stripped of the Vancouver captaincy — dumb idea in the first place — and fallen on his face when his battered and slumping team needed him the most.

How can they possibly bring him back next season?

Fact is, his horrendous contract, which doesn’t expire until 2022 and carries with it an annual cap hit of $5.333 million (U.S.), will make him very difficult to trade unless GM Mike Gillis is willing to take another terrible contract back.

So this may take time. But it probably means the Canucks now can’t trade backup goalie Cory Schneider, robbing the team of the assets he could have netted in a trade.

Beyond Luongo, there was something about this Canucks team that just didn’t ring true, and simply coming back with the same group would be to hope that group can figure out the problem itself. But, for the most part, this is a veteran team; they are what they are, and while Chris Tanev may improve, it’s unlikely the Sedins, Manny Malhotra or Sami Salo will.

Boston seemed to sense from the beginning of this series that there was a vulnerability they could exploit. If you remember, Chicago did too in the first round, and Jonathan Toews said so, made it clear he didn’t believe the Canucks were this awesome powerhouse they’d been made out to be.

The Blackhawks, however, realized that too late. Boston knew it from the start, and so head coach Claude Julien wasn’t flustered a bit when his club dropped the first two games in very painful style. If the Canucks could only beat them by a goal in B.C., Julien figured, this was a team that could be taken.

While Vancouver’s top players stumbled, the Bruins surged as a group and individuals on the roster got better and better. That was certainly the case for Dennis Seidenberg, stolen by GM Peter Chiarelli from Florida for a song at the March, 2010 trade deadline, and Patrice Bergeron. By Game 7, fourth-liners like Gregory Campbell and Shawn Thornton were pounding new dents in the Vancouver lineup with every shift, and Brad Marchand was, well, becoming a star right in front of our eyes.

Not one Vancouver player was a pleasant surprise, and a half-dozen or more Bruins were. In retrospect, the Canucks’ chance to win the Cup was in Game 6, but Luongo’s ill-timed jibes aimed at Tim Thomas were the phony bluster of an athlete who knew he wasn’t going to be able to measure up to the moment — why won’t he say nice things about me? — and with Luongo, the rest of the Canucks seemed to lose momentum and confidence in each other.

Someone suggested after it was all over that the Bruins really won the series seven games to none, and there’s some truth in that. By Game 7, Boston was in total control, and the calm with which the Bruins exited their zone time after time after time was an expression of a team that understood it was better than its opponent. The Bruins ruled the boards in this series, winning this battle in the trenches.

While the Canucks will likely try to sever ties with Luongo and need to make decisions on free-agent blueliners Christian Erhoff and Kevin Bieksa, the B’s are pretty much set. They’ll have to throw some dollars at Marchand; Michael Ryder and Tomas Kaberle are free agents, and Mark Recchi will retire.

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A repeat? Awfully tough these days, but they’ll have another good club in The Hub.

Vancouver believes it will, too. Well, we’ll see about that.

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