No Leafs, go Golden Knights
“I’m heartbroken. This is all your fault. I didn’t care about this last week. Now I am crushed.”
This is an excerpt from a rambling text message my wife sent me on the night of April 25 — moments after the Boston Bruins eliminated the Toronto Maple Leafs in round one of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for a second heartbreaking time in the recent past.
The Leafs didn’t just lose. They blew a lead in the third period of Game 7. Again. And my wife, previously apathetic about professional sports (unless you count RuPaul’s Drag Race), was angry with me because in the days leading up to our 7-4 trouncing, I managed to achieve what I thought impossible: I made her a Leafs fan, a devotee of the NHL franchise sensible people are not supposed to fall for — the hockey team equivalent of the troubled guy a girl tries and fails repeatedly to change.
Don’t get me wrong: I still “beleaf.” I “beleaf” that Auston Matthews will someday soon hoist the Cup in Toronto and fill it with American beer in his parents’ Arizona backyard. That is the delusional disease of Leafs fandom, a disease I’ve now successfully passed on to my spouse and one I hope to pass on to our future children. But there’s something else I hope to pass on to my family too, in the interest of sanity and self-care: my newfound, 100-per-cent bandwagon devotion to the Vegas Golden Knights, the “Cinderella story” expansion team headed, remarkably, into the Stanley Cup Final in their inaugural season.
A lot has been said and written about “Canada’s Team,” a title that until recently applied to the Winnipeg Jets. Until, that is, the Knights ousted them in five games, a defeat known as the Gentleman’s Sweep.
But because I’m a proud Torontonian who remains firmly suspicious of the notion that every citizen of this country should pledge fealty to whatever Canadian team is still standing in the playoffs (am I really supposed to root for the Habs or — shudder — the Sens — if they make the final one day?) I’m more interested in another question: not who is Canada’s team, but who is Toronto’s team?
In the Leafs’ absence, I nominate the Knights.
I nominate the Knights because when you’re a sports fan addicted to cheering for a franchise with oversized bag- gage, it feels really good for a change to root for a franchise that has no baggage whatsoever.
And if you hail from a sports city like Toronto, with a legacy of epic losses, whose star athletes are expected to perform under a pressure so gargantuan you wonder how they summon the nerves to tie up their laces, there is no better pick me up than rooting for the so-called “Golden Misfits” whose only pressure, it appears, is to have fun.
Don’t believe me? These are the recent words of Knights head coach Gerard Gallant speaking to reporters during a press conference. “There’s been no pressure on our guys and there’s still no pressure on our guys. Come to the rink. Enjoy your time. And have fun.”
What’s amazing about this statement is that it sounds like something a volunteer coach would tell his house league hockey team after passing around a box of Timbits. Of course you might occasionally hear a coach like Mike Babcock pay lip service to the value of “having fun” in the NHL, but that’s exactly what it is, lip service. I’m convinced Gallant really means it. And if the Knights’ unprecedented success is any indication, it works wonders.
Forget their underdog status and the fact that, Marc-Andre Fleury notwithstanding, they aren’t a team of superstars. What makes them such a satisfying team to pull for is that their success is a slapshot in the face to the analyticsdriven, strictly business attitude that dominates pro sports today. And that, in the process, they are baffling every talkinghead hockey expert in the universe.
And if you’re a hockey nationalist still hung up on the “Canada’s Team” business, you can take solace in the fact that the Knights are technically the most Canadian team in this year’s NHL playoffs. According to the hockey site Pension Plan Puppets, which did a comprehensive breakdown of the Canadian-ness of every team in the playoffs, the Knights boast a roster of sixteen Canadian players, not to mention a “Canadian coach. Canadian GM. FOUR Canadians on the leadership team. We couldn’t make them more Canadian if we pelted them with timbits and dropped the team into the Thunder Bay.” That won’t be necessary. Shortly after the Bruins eliminated the Leafs, I wandered into a downtown Toronto establishment called Spirit of Hockey, aka the Hockey Hall of Fame gift shop. I saw three men looking in the mirror trying on Vegas Golden Knights hats. They weren’t tourists from Nevada. They were Torontonians on their lunch break.
Go Leafs Go. But when they don’t, Go Knights.