OTTAWA’S HOCKEY OLYMPIANS
Three local links to Team Canada 2018
Chris Kelly has been around long enough to recall the last time NHL players weren’t at the Olympics.
“I remember watching (Paul) Kariya and (Petr) Nedved (in 1994),” Kelly said in a phone interview with Postmedia after officially being announced to Canada’s Olympic hockey team for the Pyeongchang Games in February.
“You’re glued to the TV when Canada is playing, regardless of the event. When a Canadian team or a Canadian athlete is competing, you’re always cheering them on.”
Now, at 37, after playing more than 920 regular season and playoff games in the NHL, including a pair of stints with the Ottawa Senators and winning a Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins in 2011, he finds it a bit bizarre that he has ended up being part of the five-ring Olympic circus.
He says playing in the Olympics “wasn’t even on the radar two months ago.”
The road to Pyeongchang took some strange turns.
Kelly wasn’t re-signed by the Senators in the summer, but he trained as if he had a contract, believing he had some game left.
He went to Edmonton on a professional tryout offer, but wasn’t signed after training camp. He returned home to Ottawa to contemplate the next move and opted to join the Senators’ AHL affiliate in Belleville.
It was only after he was invited to join Canada’s Spengler Cup squad over the Christmas break that he contemplated the Olympics.
“It wasn’t a plan or a goal I had in mind when the season started,” said Kelly, who will be playing with Belleville until the Canadian training camp opens. “It got to the point where I wasn’t getting any feelers from the NHL, so I decided to play in Belleville to see what would come out of it. The Spengler Cup came out of that and only then did I start thinking about the Olympic team.”
Kelly says he hasn’t seen enough of the other national teams — he played against the Swiss national team during the Spengler Cup — to give a realistic pre-Olympic prediction about where Canada could finish.
He is, however, full of national pride.
“When you do something of this magnitude, the goal is to win,” he said. “You’re going there to represent your country as best as you can.”
As Kelly was trying to come to terms with everything and anything about the Olympic experience, he was poring over the names of his Canadian teammates.
Ottawa natives Eric O’Dell and Derek Roy are also on the team.
“I know Derek well, the hockey world is a small world,” Kelly said of Roy, a former Buffalo Sabres star who had some heated battles with the Senators over the years. “There’s always mutual respect.”
At the Olympics, Kelly will also bump heads against a pair of former Senators who are on the United States team.
Winger Bobby Butler, who scored 16 goals in 94 games with the Senators from 2009-12, is on the American roster. The U.S. team also boasts defencemen Matt Gilroy, who played 14 games with the Senators in 2011-12 and Mike Lundin, who played 11 games with the Senators in 2012-13.