Hockey nationalism starts to look silly when the final Canadian team gets knocked out of the playoffs.
Our Stanley Cup drought has largely been due to bad luck
Turning old newspapers into Swiss cheese is a much more arresting image than the abstract ‘deletion of links’ on a search engine. But that is exactly the principle the ECJ is admitting in its decision. Brian Lee Crowley
It’s all over but the crying, and you can expect some crying.
There always is when a country’s identity is tied so closely to a sport. Think of when the Canadian men’s hockey team failed to medal at the Olympics, or when the United States basketball “Dream Team” came up short, or of England when it flames out of the World Cup.
The success or failure of those squads is entirely understandable: as national teams, they represent “us.”
But where Canada’s hockey nationalism starts to look pretty silly (well, sillier) is when the final Canadian team gets knocked out of the NHL playoffs. The end is nigh for this year’s edition of the Montreal Canadiens, thanks in large part to the loss of superstar netminder Carey Price to injury. Even if they manage a miraculous comeback victory over the New York Rangers, pundits and statistics agree they’ll probably be dismantled by whichever team comes out of the Western Conference.
And so the question will be asked again: “Why can’t we (Canada) win a Stanley Cup?”
It’s a question that pops up as more and more as we get further from the 1992-93 Canadiens, who took the last Canadian twirl around the ice with the great mug. The answers vary widely, from economics to geography to market pressure.
Setting aside the fact “we” refers to a city, not a country, which in itself should soothe our national anguish, the answer is simple: it’s mostly bad luck. Canadian teams have participated in five of the last 19 Stanley Cup final series, and four of those series went to a Game 7. If the coin flips another way, there’s no drought to speak of.
Of course, other factors have been at play over the past two decades. Prior to the league instituting a salary cap following the 2005 lockout, economics were a huge factor. Now, however, financial disparity is a fairly insignificant factor in most markets. One glaring exception is here in Ottawa, where ownership’s inability or unwillingness to spend even close to the maximum on player pay under the salary cap is a drag on the team’s hopes.
For the most part, however, it’s a level ice surface even for small market Canadian franchises.
A year ago, when the Cup drought hit the 20-year mark, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver — then with the New York Times — ran some numbers. If a championship team was randomly chosen for each of the 19 seasons the league actually played, there’s a 99 per cent chance that at least one Canadian team would have won the Stanley Cup over a 19-year period. Taking teams’ actual competitiveness into account, Silver estimated the odds of a Canadian win during that period were 97.5 per cent.
Because that’s still a fairly big long-shot, he weighed some other possibilities and suggested: “The Canadian NHL teams may suffer from a version of the problem that the Chicago Cubs faced during the ‘bleacher bum’ years. Their fans are so loyal — happy enough to turn out for the spectacle and the beer even if the team stinks — that the franchises don’t have all that much incentive to put out a competitive product.”
I don’t think there’s much to that. In Ottawa, interest ebbs and flows with the team’s abilities. When I covered the Senators’ swing through western markets in March, I was surprised to see rinks in Calgary and Edmonton dotted with empty seats. Patience is wearing thin in Alberta, too.
Still, Canadian cities should take heart. Of this country’s seven NHL teams, you could make a credible argument that six of them are at various stages of rebuilds, and that a seventh, the Vancouver Canucks, should be starting one. If those teams manage to cycle up at the same time, we could well be talking about a new golden age of Canadian championships.
But Lady Luck is still going to have to come up with a few assists.