Stanley’s homeward bound
The NHL’s balance of power shifts back to Canada with five teams that could challenge for the Cup in the league’s new era
It’s time for the Cup to come home. And Canada has just the teams — yes, more than one — to make it happen.
This, of course, will come as some surprise to those legions of hockey fans in the United States intending to watch the NHL in its comeback season on either NBC or, ahem, the Outdoor Life Network. Check the schedules. Neither outlet has the slightest intention of showing any Canadian content if it can help it, regardless of the quality of the six squads north of the border.
Well, U. S. fans from Tallahassee to Albuquerque are going to be mighty surprised when Lord Stanley’s tournament gets down to the nitty-gritty next May and June. The new NHL, it appears likely, will feature more Canadian power than at any time since the late 1980s, partly because of the faded brilliance of the three U. S. clubs who have dominated the league for a decade.
Free agency, salary cap concerns and aging players have, to varying degrees, sapped the strength of the Detroit Red Wings, Colorado Avalanche and New Jersey Devils, winners of a collective eight Cups in the past 10 years. All three clubs are likely to be playoff teams this season but none is even close to the juggernauts they once were. The Wings have iffy goaltending and injuries; the Avs lost Peter Forsberg and Adam Foote; and the Devils are absent a pair of Scotts, Niedermayer and Stevens, on the blue line and have cap concerns yet to be addressed. Calgary and Tampa Bay slipped into that power vacuum in the spring of 2004 as surprise Stanley Cup finalists, and, if anything, there is room for more upstarts in the post- lockout era.
Canada, it would appear, is prepared to compete in the new NHL, and possibly dominate. Five of the Canadian teams — Calgary, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton — are solidly ensconced in the upper half of the league going into the 2005- 06 season. A sixth, Toronto’s Maple Leafs, could also be a playoff team, particularly if the risk-laden, off-season acquisitions of Eric Lindros and Jason Allison bear fruit. The rise of the Canadian teams has been ongoing for some time, of course, spiritually ignited, some could argue, by the embarrassing effort to get the federal government to cough up cash to underwrite their losses. Once the feds got cold feet, the teams got down to fixing their own problems and, bolstered over time by a resurgent Canadian dollar, have done just that. The Flames, Oilers and Senators learned to live lean, concentrating on the draft and going about their business in a costconscious manner that ideally positioned them for competing
in a league where everybody now has a spending limit. The Habs and Canucks joined those teams philosophically when spending unwisely got them in trouble, and both clubs now have young and affordable talent bases. Only the Leafs failed to heed the call of fiscal conservatism and that was because they had more than enough financial muscle to buy expensive players, even ineffective ones. A bigger problem for the Leafs is that they either sacrificed young players along the way or continued to be unable to unearth them, leaving them poorly positioned for this season.
In a larger sense, assessing the relative merits of 30 teams that for the most part only faintly resemble the teams we last saw before the NHL shut down, is a bit of a mug’s game. Sure Tampa’s the reigning champion, but removing goalie Nikolai Khabibulin from that roster is like The Stones minus Charlie Watts on drums. Not debilitating, necessarily, but minus an underrated element.
Early season injuries, meanwhile, further complicate the picture. Colorado won’t have Milan Hejduk for a month, likely about the same period of time the Flames will miss Robyn Regehr on defence, and Detroit will be without sparkling young rearguard Niklas Kronwall.
St. Louis has to deal with shoulder injuries to Doug Weight and Barret Jackman, possibly the result of dragging Keith Tkachuk away from the buffet line. In Philly, both Forsberg and Derian Hatcher have had their fall training cut back by injuries. What makes the potential of the Canadian teams so compelling, however, is that five of the six — sorry, Leaf fans — managed to establish some convincing level of continuity between the end of the 2003- 04 season and today. The Flames and Sens, in particular, look very much the same as when we last saw them in meaningful competition. Montreal and Vancouver, meanwhile, declined to go free agent crazy when the lockout ended. Edmonton did get creative, bringing in Chris Pronger and Mike Peca, but the guts of the team was part of the effort that produced the hottest team in hockey down the final stretch of the 2003-04 campaign, going 16- 5- 4- 4 in the final 29 matches. None of those five Canadian clubs were in the position of, for example, Detroit, which had to axe Hatcher, Darren McCarty and Ray Whitney when the $39 million ( U. S.) salary cap was formally introduced. Only the Leafs were stuck in this way and thus could not bring back Brian Leetch, Gary Roberts, Joe Nieuwendyk and Alexander Mogilny. By design or happenstance, however, the majority of Canada’s teams ended up ideally designed to enter the NHL’s brave new world. Lord Stanley would now appreciate the return of his Cup.