OH, THOSE SHOOTOUTS
Canada. The Czech Republic. Another shootout. And a result we’d rather forget again,
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— On the day Canada lost its first Olympic men’s hockey game since 2010, it was easy enough to find reasons for doomsaying.
The Canadians, after all, fell 3-2 in a shootout to a Czech team captained by Martin Erat — the same Martin Erat who, now age 36, ran out of NHL runway back in 2015. They were outplayed at key moments by an opponent with about one-quarter their cumulative NHL experience. And they heard head coach Willie Desjardins say something the head coach of Canada’s national men’s hockey team has surely never said before.
“Korea is going to be tough,” Desjardins said.
The fact Desjardins probably wasn’t wrong might say everything about the reality of the situation. The national team of South Korea, next on Canada’s docket and playing in its first Olympics, has, just like the mighty Canadians, already partaken in a one-goal game against the Czechs, a 2-1 loss. So never mind Korea’s 8-0 loss to the Swiss — Canada’s assemblage of mostly veteran pros clearly isn’t some dominant force that can afford to look past a minnow.
Instead, the Canadians look like one of a handful of teams with the potential to leave here with the gold medal, which means they’re maybe more than likely to depart less triumphantly. There’s no shame in that. This is what you expect from international hockey played by relatively unacquainted journeymen.
Still, there’s something odd about the way this team has shown up to these first Olympics without NHLers since 1994. All we’ve heard from the players is how they’re beyond thrilled to accept the lifetime honour of wearing the national maple leaf at the five-ringed festival. And if that’s a touching sentiment, it doesn’t jibe with the collectively intermittent effort that’s accompanied it. We’ve heard Desjardins lamenting how the team didn’t play hard in preparing for the Games because they were concerned about getting hurt. On Saturday, we saw Canada more than occasionally outplayed — outskated, outbattled, outsmarted — when it mattered.
And we heard Derek Roy, the veteran NHLer, suggesting the team’s give-a-bleep metre isn’t yet set to full blast.
“Against other teams moving forward I think we’ve got to make sure we keep the gas on the pedal and keep playing all game,” Roy said.
Again, maybe that’s understandable given all 12 teams in the field make the medal round. Still, this isn’t some 82-game slog. This tour- nament is going to be over in a matter of seven days. The gold-medal game goes a week from Sunday. So yeah — start trying, fellas. Or maybe what we’ve been witnessing isn’t a lack of effort, but rather an early void of assuredness. Maybe what we’re watching is a team occasionally hampered by nerves. That’d be fair enough when you consider most of these players have never been on display with all of Canada paying attention.
And it’d also make sense if you subscribe to the theory that teams tend to take on the personality traits of their head coach.
If Canada’s players have looked nervous, Desjardins, at times, has appeared like a man overwhelmed by the strain. Maybe you caught the same pre-game close-up of Desjardins they showed in the arena here on Saturday. Standing on the bench in the moments before the opening faceoff, Desjardins swayed from side to side, teetering from foot to foot like a self-conscious fourthgrader singled out in front of his classmates. His mouth twitched. His eyes gazed blankly into the distance. And he clutched his trademark whiteboard as though it was his dry-erase answer to a security blanket.
“You never see me write on it very much — very seldom,” Desjardins was saying last week, speaking of his ubiquitous clipboard. “Usually it’s just there to protect me.” Protect him from what? “Sometimes you talk to guys on the bench and you can’t see the puck, so I use it as more of a shield,” Desjardins said.
The man they call Whiteboard Willie can certainly come off as a nervous Nellie.
To be fair, it’s very possible Desjardins’s quirks are meaningless. Maybe it’s simply a shock to see someone helming the national team that isn’t obviously possessed with a reasonable facsimile of Mike Babcock’s all-world ego. Desjardins’s many hockey-world supporters will tell you that, beyond his non-existent media acumen, he’s an excellent players’ coach. They’ll insist to you he has a fatherly knack of empowering his team with confidence, even if he doesn’t ooze the stuff himself.
Maybe, when Canada is collecting its gold medals next weekend, that’ll be the gist of some of the post-game stories his players tell.
Still, it was dumbfounding how, in the wake Saturday’s loss, Desjardins offered answers that were Belichickian in their curtness when he doesn’t own anything approaching a record that’s Belichick-ian in its peerlessness. As fans of the Vancouver Canucks can tell you, this is a man with precisely two NHL playoff wins to his name.
Then again, this isn’t the NHL. Desjardins also presided over the worst power play in the league for the final two seasons of his tenure with the Vancouver Canucks, who fired him last spring. And through the first two games of the tournament the majority of Canada’s offence had been produced by a redhot power play that had made good on four of seven attempts.
At one point, Desjardins was asked why, when Canada had a 5-on-3 advantage for 34 seconds late in Saturday’s second period, he opted to deploy three forwards and two defencemen — this when the majority of elite coaches opt for four forwards and one defenceman in such a situation. In a copycat sport it was interesting that Desjardins cut against the grain. It nearly worked, too, with Linden Vey banging a puck off the crossbar.
“We’ve got lots of skill on our back end,” Desjardins explained. “Probably just as much skill as up front.”
Maybe that was a sampling of Desjardins’s ability to imbue his players with self belief. Canada’s defence corps has been questioned for its relative anonymity and lack of NHL experience. Here was the coach sending a message: The critics are questioning if you belong here, but I’m not.
Watching Desjardins so far, only the sleepiest observer wouldn’t raise questions about whether or not he’s up to this challenge.
Whiteboard at the ready, let’s see what he draws up.