Hamilton, and its team. What a run.
Looking back at the Bulldogs’ championship through today’s lens
At a time when every day feels like a Monday or a Friday — which one depending whether things are going well for you or not — time can feel like a missing guide. Days blend into weeks. Weeks blend into months. We haven’t got there yet but, at some point, months will surely feel like years.
So, if it feels like the Hamilton Bulldogs’ Ontario Hockey League championship happened forever ago, you’re excused. Same if it seems like it just ended. Either way, it was just two springs back. We bring this up for two reasons. The first is that Cable 14 is doing what many sports networks are doing these days and replaying the team’s entire run to the title. On Thursday evening, the Bulldogs played (OK, replayed) Game 3 of their second-round matchup against the Niagara IceDogs. For those catching up, they’re ahead 2-1 at this point.
Spoiler alert: They win the series. And the next. And the one after that.
Every weeknight at 10, you can find games there, right up until the finals that begin May 11 and wrap up May 18.
It’s a terrific idea. You may have noticed that Hamilton hasn’t won a lot of championships in recent years. There have been some close calls but the number of titles is limited. So it’s fun to be able to watch one from start to finish like a second viewing of “Breaking Bad” (with a whole lot less meth, Mexican drug lords and killings, mind you).
The second reason it’s noteworthy comes when you look at the roster from that spring.
You might expect that a championship team would be loaded with surefire pros. Maybe not NHLers just yet, but close. And there certainly are some.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Robert Thomas is a regular with the St. Louis Blues. Riley Stillman played the second half of this interrupted season with the Florida Panthers. Ben Gleason and Nick Caamano have tasted the NHL with the Dallas Stars. And Kaden Fulcher played one game for the Detroit Red Wings.
But here’s the shock. Some of the guys who were stars here — Brandon Saigeon, Matt Strome, Fulcher and Ryan Moore — and who you thought would continue that rapid ascent once their OHL careers were over, are in the ECHL. That doesn’t mean they won’t make it, their NHL teams may have them there to get loads of ice time. It just says their paths to the big time may not be quite as straight as some might have thought.
It also proves something so many young players said when they arrived in Hamilton back in the day when the Bulldogs were the minor-league AHL affiliate of the Oilers and Canadiens. The step from the AHL to the NHL, they’d repeatedly say, is nowhere near as chasmic as the step from junior hockey to the pros.
“It’s very difficult to make the jump,” Bulldogs general manager Steve Staios says.
The change from playing against young men and boys to playing against men is massive. The game is faster, the guys are stronger, they’re more skilled and, without school concerns, they can focus all their time on getting even better.
If it’s a surprise some guys have had some challenges, the fact that two years after winning the OHL title eight are now out of the pro chase and playing university hockey is even more so. There’s no shame in that, of course. Getting an education is a smart thing to do and U Sports provides good hockey these days. It’s just a bit unexpected. Because many of these guys were key contributors.
Staios says not to read too much into that, either. These days there can be a path to the pros from university. It’s harder and we may be talking about Europe but it can happen.
If nothing else, it speaks to how good a team that Bulldogs group was. Everyone — everyone — expected Sault Ste. Marie to win that title. Hamilton simply played better.
This was no fluke.
The truth is, had Thomas not injured his foot in that series and Saigeon not hurt his shoulder in the first period of the Memorial Cup a week or so later, Hamilton might have had an even bigger prize to show for that year. Still, they were pretty darn good.
But you can watch it again and judge for yourself.