An agonizing departure, but oh what a fine mess
World juniors stars are unpolished — and lots of fun to watch. Let’s not waste time sweating about the future of Canadian hockey
It’s tempting, when Canada loses the wrong hockey game, to ascribe bigger problems to the loss. The joke about Royal Commissions ages pretty well, considering; Hockey Canada is under such pressure, and depends so much on teenagers at this time of year, and sometimes it goes wrong.
This year, it did: With a 6-5 loss to Finland in Helsinki, Canada failed to reach the semifinals of the world junior hockey championship for the first time since 1998.
So, failure. It happens, though rarely this early. But since the collapse in Buffalo in 2011, Canada has won a bronze medal in Alberta, a gold medal in Toronto, and recorded three non-podium finishes in Russia, Sweden, and Finland. It’s a valley, considering the golden generation that won five straight from 2005-2009, and lost a sixth in 2010, 6-5, in overtime.
And this time Canada lost to the Finns on their wide ice, and deserved it.
It was a marvellous mess of a game, a sliding, sloshing thing. It’s the best score in hockey, 6-5, not least for its rarity these days. What a game, full of skilled kids and goofups and plays that made you jump. Terrific.
Except Canada, as mentioned, lost. You can pick at the coaching: Dave Lowry not pulling goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood while the Finns swapped goalies without hesitation; the over-reliance on players like Jake Virtanen, even after his penalty that wiped out a 5-on-3 in the second period, and his disastrous double minors in the third; a lack of well-defined roles.
Oh, and the discipline: Nine penalties in a big game is a wreck. Virtanen’s double minors were thoughtless; Marner’s punch to Julius Nattinen late in the third was foolish. Virtanen, who is headed back to the Vancouver Canucks, alluded to biased referees, and Marner, the Leafs’ super-prospect, told reporters he was just trying to grab Nattinen, as if his hands were that imprecise. You’d blame their youth, but adults play that game, as well.
None of this was really new: It’s just different versions of themes we’ve seen before. Canada hasn’t produced an elite goaltender since Carey Price and Braden Holtby, and when Canada loses, the goaltending is often a trap door. As for pressure, well . . . 2013 and 2014 featured blowout semifinal losses, and when Canada blew a 3-0 third-period lead in Buffalo in 2011 and the Russians stormed to gold, it was both goaltending and pressure that broke them. The Russians then got so drunk they weren’t allowed on their flight the next morning. Kids, even the battle-hardened ones, can still be kids.
Then Canada won gold last year, and never so much as trailed. With Connor McDavid and Aaron Ekblad and others in the NHL, this version just wasn’t that good. Nobody came out of the round-robin thinking this team had the chemistry, the discipline, or the goaltending to win gold.
There were still great things. Marner’s dancing, absurd, flip-to-aspot, slalom-through-three-Finnsand-shoot assault with eight minutes left just before a 4-on-4 expired — that was stunning, and it was Canada’s best last chance while the score was still 5-5. Then came Virtanen’s mistakes, and a clearing attempt that has still not come down, and next thing you know, Finland was ahead. Marner was incredible in the third period, a man-boy among boys.
But Canada didn’t quite have enough. It happens.
And that’s OK, really. This isn’t the crisis. If you want one, there are smart people in junior hockey who worry that Canada coaches the skill out of hockey, and this country’s goaltending vacuum is well-established, and the spectre of American hockey coming for Canada is a serious one. Those problems, those worries, exist.
But this was one year, and there will be another chance next time, in Toronto and Montreal. The best larger lesson here might be this: It would be more fun if more hockey was played like that. Worse goaltending, less over-coaching, more mistakes, more goals. Going into Saturday night, NHL teams were scoring 2.66 goals per game, the lowest since 2004, the sixth-lowest number since 1966, despite the addition of three-on-three overtime. There have been two 6-5 games in the NHL this season. The game is so often a grind.
“It’s close games every night,” said Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly the other day. “There’s not a lot happening off the rush, it’s all off the cycle. Guys are so strong now, and I mean, that’s just the way the game’s played. It sucks for D-men. This year with Mike (Babcock), I haven’t seen a player or a coach have so much concentration on D-men keeping players away from the net. It’s box-outs, box-outs, keep them out. And guys are so strong, and they make the play out of the corner, and they try to get to the net.”
As another NHL player puts it, “It’s hard to watch, every night.”
And in junior, and at the world juniors, we still get to see players before they’re crammed in a box, before they’re drilled to play the 200-foot game and not take chances. This means they make mistakes, and they fail, and sometimes they soar. And again, it’s OK. It’s how hockey should be.