What happened, Canada?
For the first time since 1996, no Canadian NHL team has gone past the first playoff round
N“We are left with a landscape full of franchises that
have failed.”
EW YORK – Perhaps a Royal Commission. Yes, that could be the ticket.
It has been too long since we held a Royal Commission on hockey in Canada. Never, in fact. Canada has held Royal Commissions on everything from the Halifax Disorders in 1945 to Certain Activities of the RCMP, if you catch my drift, but never on hockey. There was a call for one on hockey violence from the NDP in 2010, but it never happened.
Clearly something needs to be done about the state of professional hockey in Canada, since at this precise moment there is no actual professional hockey being played in Canada, with the second round of the National Hockey League playoffs under way. Everyone has been sent home and forced to think about what they have done.
The last time this happened was 1996, which ushered in the winter of Canada’s professional hockey soul. The Quebec Nordiques had left the year before and were about to win the Stanley Cup as the Colorado Avalanche, with eggplant-coloured shoulder patches and Patrick Roy in net. Teemu Selanne had just been traded for Chad Kilger and Oleg Tverdovsky, and the rest of the Winnipeg Jets were about to be packed into boxes and moved to the desert.
No Canadian hockey franchise would even reach the Stanley Cup final again until Calgary did it in 2004, eight long years later. That was followed by a lockout, during which some people warned that hockey fans would discover hobbies and pastimes, and that they had a family, and would never return to the game.
Those people were, in retrospect, rubes.
But now we are left with a landscape full of franchises that have failed. The Ottawa Senators were the last Canadian team to fall, in a Game 7 against the New York Rangers, and the talk was about how unexpectedly positive the season was. It was true. They finished eighth in the Eastern Conference.
And that, along with the rebirth of the Winnipeg Jets, was the sum total of feel-good stories among Canada’s NHL teams this season. Sure, Vancouver reached the playoffs and won another Presidents’ Trophy, but it was a screeching and agonized journey that concluded in the first round, and the Canucks appeared to respond with some kind of crackup. Coach Alain Vigneault fled town without holding the traditional season-ending media address, Roberto Luongo reportedly asked to be traded before he could be asked if he would agree to betraded, and general manager Mike Gillis dodged questions on both topics as if they were flying hatchets.
Still, it’s at least better than everywhere else. Montreal was consumed by fire, linguistically and otherwise, and is now hunting for a new general manager and a new coach, with bilingualism all but promised by the search committee. Calgary has spent three seasons in the mediocre hell of near-playoff misses, and has to decide this summer whether to sell Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff and start over.
They may be dissuaded, of course, by the fact that Edmonton started over some time ago. The Oilers tried patience, and continue to try patience.
And then there is the enduring blue bonfire that is the Toronto Maple Leafs, who are now the lone team that has not reached the playoffs since the lockout ended in 2005. Heavens, this season Toronto imploded so badly that Joffrey Lupul, one of the team’s best players and most engaging personalities, was booed when he was shown on the big screen at a Blue Jays game. If people could find a torches-andpitchforks store in Toronto, things could get truly ugly.
There are theories, of course. Many free agents prefer not to be suffocated in their workplace, if they reach the market at all, and know that it was in this country that Carey Price was once booed in the first period of Montreal’s first preseason game. Many franchises lack the necessary patience because of the suffocating fans and media. Young players are cracked and boiled by adulation and pressure; every player, coach and general manager must exist under a microscope. We love our teams to death, Ron Wilson once said. Coincidentally, he was fired by the Leafs in early March.
Of course, pressure doesn’t seem to unduly afflict the Yankees, or the Lakers, or the New York Giants. Still, it was current Leafs general manager Brian Burke who once said: “I’ll tell you what: if you’re a GM in Canada, you can forget having a five-year plan. The only plan the fans and media there are interested in is the RFN plan.” RFN stands for Right Freaking Now, or something to that effect, but Burke was hired in November of 2008, and will enter his fourth full season with a team that remains several significant fixes short of respectable.
So no plan is working perfectly, just now. And if Quebec City does indeed manage to snag a team this summer, it will immediately purge that club’s management in favour of francophones, which will be its right. But it might not help, right away.
We’ve seen Calgary and Edmon- ton and Ottawa and Vancouver reach the final since 2004. We’ve seen Montreal reach the conference final in 2010. We’ve seen Winnipeg fans develop a sophisticated mass taunting system, which is at least a start.
But here we are again, with no obvious blueprint, no clear future, and a nation waiting for next year, for free agency, for the draft. Canada is left to watch Phoenix and Nashville play a playoff series so weighted with the recent past that fans of both teams should just go ahead and throw Blackberries on the ice, or with St. Louis and Los Angeles, who have combined to win one game in a Stanley Cup final, and it required Wayne Gretzky to do it. Canada is left with Philadelphia and New York, Washington and New Jersey, and above all America, which is on a streak of 17 straight Stanley Cups, and counting.
Maybe we should all go for a walk, or rediscover hobbies and pastimes and our families. We’ll be back, of course. Hope might die in the spring in Canada, but it always blooms again in the fall.