Kiss the ring: Brad Marchand taunts Vancouver bench

It is a near certainty that no one would ever accuse the Bruins' Brad Marchand of being a classy player. A good player? Yes. A guy you love when he's on your team but hate when he's employed by the other guy? Absolutely. There's something to be said about getting into your opponents' head, but when you're doing it during a game that you're losing by a handy margin? Probably not the best time.

Marchand did it a few times, "lifting the Cup" during warmups and while skating past the Canucks' bench:

And "kissing his ring" after skating away from a shoving match with Henrik Sedin:

This almost comes across less as classless and more as deflection. You're getting your butt kicked. You need to feel better about yourself, so you bring up that time you beat the Canucks for the Stanley Cup. It makes Marchand feel better about his team losing, and it ticks off Vancouver – mission accomplished. If the Bruins would've brought as much thought to the game as Marchand did to his trolling, maybe it wouldn't've been necessary.

His actions didn't exactly gain the approval of Bruins coach Claude Julien (from the Big Bad Blog):

“I heard,” Julien said. “I did hear, and obviously I don’t watch the game; I coach the game, but I heard. He’s a good player, and he’s an agitator, and there’s some good things to that part of his game, but there’s certain areas where — again, I’ve said it before — you can’t cross the line. Sometimes his emotions get the better of him.

 

“We’ve worked with him and we’re going to continue to work with him. The perception it gives our organization is not what you want to see with those kind of things. Again, I don’t know what he said to you guys, but it’s certainly something we’re going to deal with.

 

“He’s too good of a player and we don’t want him to be a different player, but there’s certain things we want him to be different at. From what I hear, what happened, that’s definitely not something we will accept in our organization.”

So if the ring kiss came from an eye gouge, what motivated the Cup raise?