This isn’t a normal Cup final
Lord Stanley’s Mug is going to a casino or the Kremlin, and who saw that coming?
Well, don’t we all feel like idiots. It’s one thing for a hockey team nobody could have remotely expected to reach the Stanley Cup final to get there; a team so wildly improbable that even their mere presence is disorienting, as if this were all a dream. I mean, the Washington Capitals? Come on.
But the Vegas Golden Knights will also play for the Stanley Cup, which, if we’re being honest, is a bit of a surprise. It’s probably the most fascinating Cup final in memory, really. What had a more compelling blend of teams, players and cities? Here we get Alexander Ovechkin’s long-suffering career, and Las Vegas’s instant karma. We get America’s two foremost cities of sin and venality. The Cup is either going to a casino or the Kremlin, and nobody could possibly know which, because who had these teams here in the first place?
First, Vegas. An expansion team playing for a championship is a lot of things, and nobody can fully agree what it means. Some people say it is an embarrassment to the league, or to the league’s general managers; some say it is simply one of the most delightful sports stories anybody could ever imagine.
The conversations go something like this:
Person one: It’s embarrassing to the NHL! Who lets this happen?
Person two: It’s embarrassing to the GMs! They let this happen!
Person three: It’s fun! Why do you hate fun? What deadened your spirit?
Person one: We’re hockey fans, man. Who hates fun more than hockey? Person two: Maybe baseball. Person three: Yeah. But guys, guys: you’re all correct. It is embarrassing when a team full of expansion castoffs rampages from wire to wire, piling up the fifth-best record in the NHL despite having to use three goalies, but the NHL surely doesn’t care, because it got $500 million (U.S.) for a smash-hit expansion team in a southern, nontraditional U.S. market. Seattle is going to have to pay, like, a billion.
It is embarrassing to some general managers, whose decisions at the expansion draft were absurd: Dale Tallon in Florida gave Vegas twothirds of its devastating top line in Jonathan Marchessault and Rielly Smith, after Marchessault had recorded a 30goal season at age 25. Columbus’s Jarmo Kekalainen gave Vegas a first- and secondround pick to take William Karlsson, the third member of the line, as long as they took David Clarkson’s dead-money contract as well. Toronto’s Dave Nonis, since replaced, gave Clarkson that contract, which was traded for the Nathan Horton contract Columbus gave the oft-injured winger. Woof.
There were others, of course: Even Washington gave Columbus defenceman Nate Schmidt, who has been tremendous. And Pittsburgh gave them perhaps the nicest goalie on earth, Marc-André Fleury, who has put up a .947 save percentage in the playoffs. One key for Vegas: Every GM makes mistakes. A smart general manager takes advantage of other people’s mistakes. The Knights more or less got to take advantage of everybody’s.
The other key is: In a game filled with the clatter of physics and luck, have a goalie. It helps.
But this Vegas run cannot be duplicated, and has a cinematic magic to it that is so rare in sports, and should be treasured. The Capitals, meanwhile, protected Andre Burakovsky over Schmidt, and he scored two of Washington’s four goals in Game 7 against Tampa, so maybe that wasn’t the worst decision. Ovechkin scored the first one, and he is in a Cup final, finally. As Nicklas Backstrom told reporters who were actually in Tampa, “It only took 11 years.”
And that is incredible, too. After years of high-achieving disappointments, they did it. The Capitals lost another Game 7 to Pittsburgh last season in dispiriting fashion, lost much of their Presidents’ Trophy-winning depth over the summer, trailed in every series, and could have been eliminated against Tampa, twice. But Ovechkin was a lion, and the whole team followed, and finally the greatest goalscorer of his era will play for a Stanley Cup. Incredible.
It should be easy to appreciate this. Vegas is literally made of unwanted players whose coach empowers them after mistakes rather than runs them down, who play fast and fun hockey, who look fearless. It is a ridiculous thing, and calls into question so much of what we think we know about hockey, and indeed, what anyone knows about hockey. But it’s a wonder.
And Washington ... well, Ovechkin is older, wiser, greyer. He still has a kinship and admiration of Vladimir Putin which is both understandable and sad. He is still one of the great goal-scorers of all time, and maybe the greatest. He has played with such a passion in these playoffs. He has been a human engine. You can see how much it means to him.
How compelling. Think of all of Washington’s disappointments over the years. Think of how indelible every loss was, every Game 7 failure, every second-round collapse. Think of how much the Capitals and Ovechkin put into those games, how much emotional energy and hope was invested, only to feel the utter emptiness of the dressing room afterwards. And they still threw themselves back into it again, and again, with more hope, more emotion, knowing they could fail. Until they did it.
What a thing. It could be a hell of a final, no matter who wins. Try not to miss it.