Are you Team Thornton or Team Kessel?
That’s the “Twilight’’-esque question for Boston hockey fans as they watch a Stanley Cup Final that includes two ghosts of Bruins’ promise past, Joe Thornton and Phil Kessel.
The final round of the best postseason in professional sports commences on Monday in Pittsburgh, as Thornton and the San Jose Sharks square off against Kessel and the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The “Twilight’’ saga featured a blood feud between vampires and werewolves, two staples of horror canon. Watching Thornton or Kessel lift Lord Stanley’s hardware qualifies as a horror film of sorts for Hub hockey fans. It’s a reminder of what has contributed to the Bruins’ current rudderless state — squandering valuable assets.
While the Bruins are selling their fan base on the merits of re-signing ordinary people such as Kevan Miller, two of their former phenoms are fighting for the Stanley Cup.
This is already a spring of discontent as the Bruins are playoff bystanders for the second consecutive year. Adding insult to playoff inactivity is the fact that one of these erstwhile Bruins, both traded away in their primes, is going to have their career validated with a Cup. One of them is going to have as many Stanley Cups to his name as Patrice Bergeron. Fighting in hockey is flagging, but this is a punch in the teeth for the Spoked-Believers and the Jacobs clan.
This is the first Stanley Cup Final appearance for Thornton or Kessel, top-five picks who have piled up points and criticism during their careers.
The parallel between the Team Edward (vampire) and Team Jacob (werewolf) showdown in the “Twilight’’ movies applies shockingly well here.
An underachiever with a playoff beard so overgrown he’ll need a machete to shave it, Thornton resembles a werewolf. Kessel’s stolid demeanor is befitting of a bloodless creature, and Toronto Maple Leafs observers will tell you he can suck the life out of a team.
Although saddled with the sandbags of past failures that shape the perception of their careers, both players have delivered in the playoffs. Thornton and Kessel are tied for the fifth-most points this postseason with 18.
Kessel’s nine goals are tied for third in these playoffs, and his five power-play tallies are tied for first.
Thornton and Kessel were both projected to be cornerstone players for the Bruins. There were visions of their numbers being raised to the rafters and of them lifting the Cup overhead on Causeway Street. Instead, you can trace the Bruins’ current plight, in part, back to them.
Thornton was the No. 1 pick in the 1997 NHL Draft. A center with uncommon skill and vision for his size, he was going to follow in the footsteps of Shore, Schmidt, Orr, and Bourque.
He had a 37-goal season at age 21 and topped 100 points in a season at 23. But Jumbo Joe always appeared uncomfortable being thrust into a franchise front man role and far more comfortable as a clever playmaker than a bruising, immutable net-front force, anathema to the organizational ethos of the Bruins.
After labor strife wiped out the 2004-05 season, the team traded Thornton to San Jose just 26 games into the 2005-06 season. It remains one of the worst trades in Boston sports history — Thornton for Brad Stuart, Marco Sturm, and Wayne Primeau. Thornton led the league in scoring that season with 125 points and won the Hart Trophy as league MVP.
Without Thornton, the Bruins finished with the league’s fifth-worst record, allowing them to take . . . Kessel, a sharpshooting, smooth-skating winger from the University of Minnesota, with the fifth pick in the 2006 draft.
Phil The Thrill scored a team-high 36 goals as a 21-year-old in 2008-09.
But the Thrill was gone by September of 2009. A restricted free agent, Kessel rebuffed the Bruins’ contract offers, chafing at the idea of continuing to play in Claude Julien’s creativity-cramping system. He forced a trade to Toronto.
The windfall for Kessel was supposed to set up the Bruins for years to come: a 2010 first-round pick, which became another discarded franchise forward in Tyler Seguin, a 2010 second-round pick (Jared Knight), and a 2011 first-round pick, used to take defenseman Dougie Hamilton.
None of them are still Bruins.
Seguin and Hamilton followed in Kessel’s skate marks, traded away before they reached age 23. Seguin was banished for immature behavior. Hamilton chafed at life as a Bruin.
Only the federal government squanders valuable resources like the Bruins.
If you really want to feel bad about the Spoked-B, don’t look in the San Jose net.
Sharks goalie Martin Jones was briefly a Bruin. Jones, who leads the playoffs in wins (12) and shutouts (3), was acquired, along with Colin Miller and a first-round pick (Jakub Zboril), last June for Milan Lucic.
Four days later, Jones was sent to San Jose for a 2016 first-round pick and the rights to Sean Kuraly.
Jones seems to have the, uh, stomach for playing net in crucial games.
If you have to root for one of these hockey exes, it should be Thornton. The Cup is the one accomplishment missing from his Hall of Fame-worthy CV.
Thornton has been a pucks piñata because of his failure to win in the postseason, even losing his captaincy in 2014 after the Sharks blew a 3-0 lead to the Los Angeles Kings.
In 2011, then-Rangers coach John Tortorella’s trenchant retort to Jumbo Joe calling the Rangers “soft’’ targeted Thornton’s inability to osculate the Cup.
“Joe is a heck of a player, but here’s a player popping off about our team, and Joe hasn’t won a god [darn] thing in this league,’’ Tortorella said at the time. “He could go down as . . . being one of the better players in our league never to win anything. So, what he should do is just shut up.’’
I’ll enjoy a Cup of Joe.
No matter whether Team Thornton or Team Kessel wins the Cup, the Bruins look like they lost out.
Christopher L. Gasper is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cgasper@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @cgasper.
