OUTGUNNED OUTDOORS
Canada falls to U.S. in shootout at chilly world junior game before 44,000 fans,
Oh, it was a spectacle, but then every outdoor hockey game is a spectacle. Like a Zamboni operator being able to drive, it’s part of the job description. The United States played Canada in the first-ever outdoor game at a world junior hockey championship, and the snow filled the freezing air and danced and swirled and, most of all, fell.
“I think our speed was fine, but the puck was in your feet,” said Canadian captain Dillon Dubé, after Canada lost 4-3 to the United States in a shootout. “You’re almost just poking at it to make it keep up the same pace as you. So it was tough, but it was fun. When they were shovelling the snow, you could almost make a fort.”
In other words, it was ridiculous. Yes, it was a spectacle. So, if you use the loosest sense of the term, was the truck fire that closed the QEW on Friday morning, which combined with delays at the border caused some of the record junior crowd of 44,592 to arrive late. The football stadium filled most of the way up in time for those fans to get snowed on, and snowed on some more, as they watched hockey attempt to be played between shovelling sessions. The U.S. came back from a 3-1 deficit in the third period. On paper, not a bad game.
On the ice, it was absurd, as outdoor games tend to be.
Before the game the players spoke of how excited they were, and also how they would have to play simple hockey, cautious hockey, meat-and-potatoes hockey. Which, if you have ever watched an outdoor game, is the only true common thread that runs though every single one.
Well, that and the money. One of the great ironies of the plague of outdoor games is the factors that truly make them spectacles — snow, primarily, or in some cases rain — are what make the hockey itself so unspectacular. Which is why, as the money-making venture has spread across the sport, another common thread is that outdoor games don’t mean very much, by design. They are one game of 82, or in some places all-star games. You don’t let the possibility of ridiculous conditions influence a game that matters.
But this game mattered.
In the end, the IIHF and USA Hockey dodged a real storm: Had the Americans lost they would have been in danger of finishing fourth in the group, and facing Sweden or Russia in the quarter-finals. As it stood, Canada can still clinch first with a regulation win over Denmark, and the U.S. can still finish second by beating Finland.
Still, what a silly thing. The crowd, partly delayed by a morning vehicle fire near Grimsby, or lines at the border, filled in just in time for the precipitation to start, and only the top corners were empty when the lake-effect stuff hit, dropping an inch or two an hour. The ice crew brought out both double-wheel wheelbarrows and garbage cans for the shovellers during every timeout; by the end of the second period they could have built a respectable child’s toboggan hill behind one net.
But instead of a dazzling display of speed and skill, we got some powerplay goals, long stretches of nothing much, and some flashes of brilliance. The best player was probably American Sabres pick Casey Mittelstadt, who assisted on both American goals in the third period, and threw a pass at the end of regulation that nearly resulted in a regulation winner.
It could have been better, though.
“Heading into the second was almost the worst; towards the third, I think you couldn’t really see it too well,” said Dubé. “Sometimes you could see it riffling in the snow, but you couldn’t even see the black of it.” Asked how the game might have played out differently on an NHL rink, Canada’s Maxime Comtois said simply, “I could see the puck.”
Now, they loved it. Canadian Boris Katchouk, who scored Canada’s third goal, said he felt like a kid again. Dubé said he thought he snow made the game better. But then, they weren’t watching. There was nothing like Mittelstadt’s thrilling goal against Slovakia Thursday night, when the Sabres pick turned and wheeled past a defender, slalomed to the net, and tucked the puck past a goalie he had turned into a doormat before doing a miniBobby Orr dive. There wasn’t an end-to-end goal like the Slovak winner from Samuel Bucek. It was impossible.
And so the Canadians took some dumb penalties and turned over too many pucks, and you can’t say the Americans didn’t deserve to win. As Comtois put it, “the conditions didn’t do this to us. We did it to ourselves.”
So yes, it was a spectacle: the snow, the shadows on the ice as night fell, the puffs of snow as players dug their blades into the ice.
But look at it this way: the best hockey game I saw this year — including the NHL regular season, the NHL playoffs, and the Stanley Cup final — was Canada and the United States on Jan. 5, in Montreal. It was a swashbuckling, lurching, thrilling game, the best kind of junior game, full of the scrambling chaos of hockey before NHL coaches drill out all the mistakes. The Americans won 5-4, and the only lousy part was that it went to a shootout.
In this game, the game began and ended with two-on-ones that bounced away, one for each team, and players were tripping in ruts on the ice. Even the three-on-three OT wasn’t so much scrambling glorious chaos as puck management. There was real skill out there, sure. The players made this thing about as good as it could be.
Not enough, though. It wasn’t a great hockey game, not really. It was a spectacle, instead.